The undoubted cleverness of the performance, and the beauty of the child, brought to them a temporary prosperity.  The Great Fortinbras rose from the music-halls to the assembly rooms of provincial towns.  The performance became genteel, and ladies flocked to the matinees.

The Great Fortinbras dropped his pseudonym and became once more Captain Harland.

As Celia grew up, he tried a yet higher flight—­he became a spiritualist, with Celia for his medium.  The thought-reading entertainments became thrilling seances, and the beautiful child, now grown into a beautiful girl of seventeen, created a greater sensation as a medium in a trance than she had done as a lightning thought-reader.

“I saw no harm in it,” Celia explained to M. Fleuriot, without any attempt at extenuation.  “I never understood that we might be doing any hurt to any one.  People were interested.  They were to find us out if they could, and they tried to and they couldn’t.  I looked upon it quite simply in that way.  It was just my profession.  I accepted it without any question.  I was not troubled about it until I came to Aix.”

A startling exposure, however, at Cambridge discredited the craze for spiritualism, and Captain Harland’s fortunes declined.  He crossed with his daughter to France and made a disastrous tour in that country, wasted the last of his resources in the Casino at Dieppe, and died in that town, leaving Celia just enough money to bury him and to pay her third-class fare to Paris.

There she lived honestly but miserably.  The slimness of her figure and a grace of movement which was particularly hers obtained her at last a situation as a mannequin in the show-rooms of a modiste.  She took a room on the top floor of a house in the Rue St. Honore and settled down to a hard and penurious life.

“I was not happy or contented—­no,” said Celia frankly and decisively.  “The long hours in the close rooms gave me headaches and made me nervous.  I had not the temperament.  And I was very lonely—­my life had been so different.  I had had fresh air, good clothes, and freedom.  Now all was changed.  I used to cry myself to sleep up in my little room, wondering whether I would ever have friends.  You see, I was quite young—­only eighteen—­and I wanted to live.”

A change came in a few months, but a disastrous change.  The modiste failed.  Celia was thrown out of work, and could get nothing to do.  Gradually she pawned what clothes she could spare; and then there came a morning when she had a single five-franc piece in the world and owed a month’s rent for her room.  She kept the five-franc piece all day and went hungry, seeking for work.  In the evening she went to a provision shop to buy food, and the man behind the counter took the five-franc piece.  He looked at it, rung it on the counter, and, with a laugh, bent it easily in half.

“See here, my little one,” he said, tossing the coin back to her, “one does not buy good food with lead.”