As he stepped softly up to her, touched her familiarly on the shoulder, and pronounced her name, she looked up with a frightened start, and, with eyes red from weeping, gazed into the face of the unexpected comforter, as if she took him for a ghost. But the moment she recognized him, she hastily wiped her eyes with the back of her little round hand, and smiled upon him with undisguised pleasure. He asked compassionately what it was that made her so heavy-hearted, and why she sat here all alone; and, drawing up a chair, he seated himself between one of the horrible young peasant-girls and the melancholy little Bacchante. Then she told him what the trouble was. "Black Pepi," her friend, the girl with whom she had been living, had suddenly "proved false" to her, because her (Pepi's) lover, a young surgeon, had declared red to be the most beautiful color. He afterward apologized for it by saying that, of course, with his profession, it was only natural that he should prefer the color of the blood to any other. But it had for some time past appeared to Pepi that her faithless lover paid rather more attention to her friend than was permissible in such a case; and so, after a very violent scene, she had not only broken off the friendship, but had given her notice that she could no longer share her quarters with her. Furthermore, inasmuch as Zenz was still owing rent for several months, she had seized upon the few things she had to hold as security, and had then driven her from the house with only the clothes she had on at the time. "Only see," said the girl, lifting her dark shawl; "she did not even leave me a respectable dress: if it had not been for the shawl that the landlady lent me, I should have been ashamed to go across the street." And it was really so; she wore a simple sack of striped cotton under her black covering, that she carefully wrapped about her again. But now it began to look as though she no longer troubled herself in the least about the adventure that had so recently made her weep. The pale little face that she turned toward her neighbor, brightly illuminated by the lantern, had even lost its expression of anger at this insulting treatment and betrayal of friendship, and beamed again with light-heartedness and irrepressible enjoyment. "And what are you going to do, Zenz?" "I don't know yet. I shall manage to find some place to stay at. I could go to the Rochus garden, or the Neusigl, where I lodged when I first came here; but the waiters there have keys to the doors, and I have found that it is not safe there. And anywhere else, where I am not known, they might think that I would not be able to pay for the room, and I really have no money but a few kreutzers. I should have to pawn the ring that I have from my poor dead mother. Well, the day is not over yet, and I can think the matter over again."