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 s