She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street.  She kept saying to herself:  “I’m all alone now, and I’m going to be ill.  I am ill.”  She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel.  She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it.  She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could read the word ‘Bock’ on the red circlet of paper which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane.  She knew she would never sleep again.  She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions.  It was a knocking at the door.  With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep.

“Enter,” she murmured.

There entered the menial in alpaca.  His waxen face showed a morose commiseration.  He noiselessly approached the bed—­he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity—­and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.

It was Chirac’s card.

“Monsieur asked for monsieur,” said the waiter.  “And then, as monsieur had gone away he demanded to see madame.  He says it is very important.”

Her heart jumped, partly in vague alarm, and partly with a sense of relief at this chance of speaking to some one whom she knew.  She tried to reflect rationally.

“What time is it?” she inquired.

“Eleven o’clock, madame.”

This was surprising.  The fact that it was eleven o’clock destroyed the remains of her self-confidence.  How could it be eleven o’clock, with the dawn scarcely finished?

“He says it is very important,” repeated the waiter, imperturbably and solemnly.  “Will madame see him an instant?”

Between resignation and anticipation she said:  “Yes.”

“It is well, madame,” said the waiter, disappearing without a sound.

She sat up and managed to drag her matinee from a chair and put it around her shoulders.  Then she sank back from weakness, physical and spiritual.  She hated to receive Chirac in a bedroom, and particularly in that bedroom.  But the hotel had no public room except the dining-room, which began to be occupied after eleven o’clock.  Moreover, she could not possibly get up.  Yes, on the whole she was pleased to see Chirac.  He was almost her only acquaintance, assuredly the only being whom she could by any stretch of meaning call a friend, in the whole of Europe.  Gerald and she had wandered to and