"I'm sorely afraid it will be for dinner to-night and breakfast to-morrow morning too," replied Sir Ralph. "It's too bad that virtue such as ours should have such a reward. We did unto others as we would they should do unto us; and this is the consequence. Terry intends to work all night on the car, if he can get the mechanic to keep his shop going, and we may hope to start as early in the morning as you like." "Perhaps Joseph may have mine ready to-night, in which case I can take the ladies on--" the Prince began, but Mamma was too overcome to hear him. Trying to look like a Countess at all costs, she allowed herself and us to be led, as lambs to the slaughter, up a flight of dirty stone stairs, to see the bedrooms. "You will have our best, is it not, Madame la Comtesse?" inquired the man of the hotel, who seemed to be a cross between a manager and a head-waiter, and who swelled with politeness behind a shirt-front that resembled nothing so much as the ten of clubs. "Yes, I was sure of that, gracious madame. You and your suite may assure yourselves that you will be placed in our _chambres de luxe_." With this announcement, he threw open a door, and stood salaaming that we might file in before him. Mamma pitched forward down a step, shrieked, tottered, saved herself by clawing the air, while Maida and I both pitched after her, falling into fits of laughter. It could n't have been colder in the spotty man's family vault, and I hope not as musty. Maida flew to one of the two windows, set deep in the thickness of the wall, and darkened by the stone arcade outside. But apparently it was hermetically sealed, and so was the other which I attacked. The Ten of Clubs looked shocked when we implored him to open something--anything; and it was with reluctance that he unscrewed a window. "The ladies will be cold," he said. "It is not the weather for letting into the house the out of doors. We do that in the summer." "Haven't these windows been opened since then?" gasped Maida. "But no mademoiselle. Not to my knowledge." "Make him show us other rooms, quick," said Mamma, who can't speak much more French than a cat, though she had a lesson from a handsome young gentleman every day at Cap Martin, at ten francs an hour. "This is the only one that will accommodate the ladies," replied the Ten of Clubs. "The other that we have unoccupied must be for the gentlemen." The idea of our two men and the Prince as room-mates was so excruciating that I suddenly felt equal to bearing any hardship; but Mamma hasn't the same sense of humour I have, and she said that she knew she was sickening for something, probably small-pox. "Three of us in this room all night!" she wailed. "We shall never leave the hotel alive." At this juncture Sir Ralph appeared at the door, peeping gingerly in at us, and looking the picture of misery.