le Molly," she said
to herself. "How dreadfully she will be crying! What shall I do?"

Two or three ideas struck her. Should she go down one of the staircases
which every now and then she came upon, and find her way out of the
palace, and down in the street try to call a cab to take her back to the
hotel? But she had no money with her, and no idea what a cab would cost.
And she was frightened of strange cabmen, and by no means sure that she
could intelligibly explain the address. Besides this, she could not bear
to go home without them all, feeling certain that they would not desert
the palace till they had searched every corner for her.

"If I could but be sure of any place they _must_ pass," she said to
herself, with her good sense reviving; "it would be the best way to wait
there till they come."

She jumped up again. "The door out!" she exclaimed. "They _must_ pass it.
Only perhaps," her hopes falling, "there are several doors. The best one
to wait at would be the one we came in by, if I could but tell which it
was. Let me see--yes, I remember, as we came upstairs, aunty said, 'This
is the Grand Escalier.' If I ask for the 'Grand Escalier.'"

Her courage returned. The very next cocked hat she came upon, she asked
to direct her to the "Grand Escalier." He sent her straight back through
a vestibule she had just left, at the other entrance to which she found
herself at the head of the great staircase.

"I am sure this is the one we came up," she thought, as she ran down, and
her certainty was confirmed, when, having made her way out through the
entrance hall at the foot of the staircase, she caught sight, a few yards
off, of an old apple woman's stall in the courtyard.

"I remember that stall quite well," thought Sylvia, and in her delight
she felt half inclined to run up to the apple-woman and kiss her. "She
looks nice," she said to herself, "and they must pass that way to get to
the street we came along. I'll go and stand beside her."

Half timidly the little girl advanced towards the stall. She had stood
there a minute or two before its owner noticed her, and turned to ask if
mademoiselle wanted an apple.

Sylvia shook her head. She had no money and did not want any apples,
but might she stand there to watch for her friends, whom she had lost
in the crowd. The old woman, with bright black eyes and shrivelled-up,
yellow-red cheeks, not unlike one of her own apples that had been thrown
aside as spoilt, turned