Her pale smile, of hope at last realised, had reappeared on her features, and with a gesture she foreshadowed her departure from the world, the end of the part which she had played as a good invisible fairy--her disappearance for evermore. Madame Caroline had caught hold of her hands and was pressing and kissing them, so upset by remorse and pity that she stammered out disjointed words. 'You do wrong to excuse me,' she said; 'I am guilty--that poor girl, I must see her, I will go to see her at once.' And thereupon she went off, leaving the Princess and her old servant to begin their packing for the great departure, which was to separate them after forty years of life together. Two days previously, on the Saturday, the Countess de Beauvilliers had resigned herself to the course of abandoning her mansion to her creditors. For six months past she had not been able to pay the interest on the mortgage, and, what with costs of all sorts and the ever-present threat of foreclosure and enforced sale, the situation had become intolerable. Accordingly, her lawyer had advised her to let everything go, and to retire to some small lodging, where she might live on next to nothing, whilst he endeavoured to liquidate her affairs. She would not have yielded; even to the very annihilation of her race, the downfall of the ceilings upon her head she would have persisted, perhaps, in her efforts to keep up her station, and to make it appear that she was still possessed of means, had not a fresh misfortune all at once prostrated her. Her son Ferdinand, the last of the Beauvilliers--that useless young fellow, who, kept apart from all employment in France, had become a Pontifical Zouave in order to escape from his nullity and idleness--had died ingloriously at Rome, his blood so impoverished, his system so severely tried by the oppressive sun, that, already ill, suffering from a complaint of the chest, he had not been able to fight at Mentana.[28]