cious of her great brown eyes fixed upon me, the dog-like
appeal of our first meeting intensified to heart-breaking piteousness.
On seeing me she did not rise, but cowered as if I would strike her. I
looked at her, unable to speak. Antoinette stood sobbing in the doorway.

"Well?" said I, at last.

"I have come home," said Carlotta.

"You have been away a long time," said I.

"Ye-es," said Carlotta.

"Why have you come?" I asked.

"I had no money," said Carlotta, with her expressive gesture of upturned
palms. "I had nothing but that." She pointed to a tiny travelling bag.
"Everything else was at the Mont de Piete--the pawnshop--and they would
not keep me any longer at the pension. I owed them for three weeks, and
then they lent me money to buy my ticket to London. I said Seer Marcous
would pay them back. So I came home."

"But where--where is Pasquale?" I asked.

"He went five, six months ago. He gave me some money and said he would
send some more. But he did not send any. He went to South Africa. He
said there was a war and he wanted to fight, and he said he was sick of
me. Oh, he was very unkind," she cried with the quiver of her baby lips.
"I wish I had never seen him."

"Are you married?"

"No," said Carlotta.

"Damn him!" said I, between my teeth.

"He was going to marry me, but then he said it did not matter in Paris.
At first he was so nice, but after a little--oh, Seer Marcous dear, he
was so cruel."

There was a short silence. Antoinette wept by the door, uttering little
half-audible exclamations _"la pauvre petite, le cher ange!"_

Carlotta regarded me wistfully. I saw a new look of suffering in her
eyes. For myself I felt numb with pain.

"What kind of a pension were you living in?" I asked, unutterable
horrors coming into my head.

"It was a French family, an old lady and two old daughters, and one fat
German professor. Pasquale put me there. It was very respectable," she
added, with a wan smile, "and so dull. Madame Champet would scarcely let
me go into the street by myself."

"Thank heaven you did not fall into worse hands," said I.

Carlotta unpinned her old straw hat, quite a different garment from the
dainty head-wear she delighted in a year before, and threw it on the
couch beside her. A tress of her glorious bronze hair fell loose across
her forehead, adding to the woebegone expression of her face. She rose,
and as she did so I seemed to notice a curious change in her. She came