Later, amid the stir of the hotel, there came a knock at her door, impatient and nervous.  Forgetting, in her tribulation, that she was without her bodice, she got up from the floor in a kind of miserable dream, and opened.  Chirac stood on the landing, and he had Gerald by the arm.  Chirac looked worn out, curiously fragile and pathetic; but Gerald was the very image of death.  The attainment of ambition had utterly destroyed his equilibrium; his curiosity had proved itself stronger than his stomach.  Sophia would have pitied him had she in that moment been capable of pity.  Gerald staggered past her into the room, and sank with a groan on to the bed.  Not long since he had been proudly conversing with impudent women.  Now, in swift collapse, he was as flaccid as a sick hound and as disgusting as an aged drunkard.

“He is some little souffrant,” said Chirac, weakly.

Sophia perceived in Chirac’s tone the assumption that of course her present duty was to devote herself to the task of restoring her shamed husband to his manly pride.

“And what about me?” she thought bitterly.

The fat woman ascended the stairs like a tottering blancmange, and began to gabble to Sophia, who understood nothing whatever.

“She wants sixty francs,” Chirac said, and in answer to Sophia’s startled question, he explained that Gerald had agreed to pay a hundred francs for the room, which was the landlady’s own—­fifty francs in advance and the fifty after the execution.  The other ten was for the dinner.  The landlady, distrusting the whole of her clientele, was collecting her accounts instantly on the completion of the spectacle.

Sophia made no remark as to Gerald’s lie to her.  Indeed, Chirac had heard it.  She knew Gerald for a glib liar to others, but she was naively surprised when he practised upon herself.

“Gerald!  Do you hear?” she said coldly.

The amateur of severed heads only groaned.

With a movement of irritation she went to him and felt in his pockets for his purse; he acquiesced, still groaning.  Chirac helped her to choose and count the coins.

The fat woman, appeased, pursued her way.

“Good-bye, madame!” said Chirac, with his customary courtliness, transforming the landing of the hideous hotel into some imperial antechamber.

“Are you going away?” she asked, in surprise.  Her distress was so obvious that it tremendously flattered him.  He would have stayed if he could.  But he had to return to Paris to write and deliver his article.

“To-morrow, I hope!” he murmured sympathetically, kissing her hand.  The gesture atoned somewhat for the sordidness of her situation, and even corrected the faults of her attire.  Always afterwards it seemed to her that Chirac was an old and intimate friend; he had successfully passed through the ordeal of seeing ‘the wrong side’ of the stuff of her life.

She shut the door on him with a lingering glance, and reconciled herself to her predicament.