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 to me with extended hands.
“Seer Marcous—” she whispered.
I took her hands in mine.
“Oh, my dear,” said I, “why did you leave me?”
“I was wicked. And I was a little fool,” said Carlotta.
I sighed, released her, walked a bit apart. There was a blubber from the egregious old woman in the threshold.