About ten minutes afterward the waiter came back and told Sylvia that all the gentlemen were gone away except M. Florilor, who insisted upon being received. "Insists?" cried Sylvia. "But is he the crown prince of Avereshti?" The waiter shrugged his shoulders. "His father has a mortgage on the hotel," he explained. "And the proprietor would be very much upset to think that any discourtesy had been shown to the son." "Have we paid for this room?" Sylvia demanded. The waiter agreed with her that they had paid for it. "Very well, when we ask for free board and lodging it will be time enough to talk about the proprietor's annoyance at our refusal to receive his creditors." She indicated the direction of the door with a contemptuous inclination of the head, and the waiter retired. "I don't know how you can be so strong to talk like that," Queenie marveled. "If I was being alone here I should be too frightened to speak so to the waiter. Suppose they was all to murder us to-night?" When Queenie spoke like this, Sylvia's old sense of guardianship flowed again as fast as ever, and any impulse to abandon her was drowned in a flood of rage against the arrogance of money with its sale and purchase of human lives. There was something less distasteful about the domination of Zozo than about the attempted domination of this young Rumanian puppy yelping in his back yard of a town. If the juggler were to arrive in Avereshti to-night and in a frenzy of balked passion were to murder both herself and Queenie, there would be a kind of completeness about the action that made the presentiment of it a sane and feasible terror; but that Queenie should have been reduced to a condition of semi-idiocy merely by the fact that the accidents of her childhood had put her for sale on the market of life did seem to Sylvia inexpressibly revolting.