"When the web of my theory in which I'm sitting like a spider gets swept away by something more powerful than you, my butterfly, whom even without interference I can scarcely retain. You'll escape me then and be caught finally in a net, and I shall scuttle off and hide myself in a dark corner until I die of inanition and chagrin." "I was not understanding one word of what you were saying," said Queenie. "First you were being a dog. After you were being a spider. Who was ever to understand you?" "Who indeed?" Sylvia murmured with half a sigh, as she went out on the balcony and looked down upon the frequenters of the cafés, whose heads, when she appeared, were simultaneously lifted to regard her with a curiosity that her elevated position made impersonal as the slow glances of cattle at pasture. That evening after dinner the first sign of the proprietor's displeasure at the snub administered to the heir of his chief creditor was visible in a bill for their board of three days. The sum was not large, but by using up their small cash it involved breaking into the five-hundred-franc note that represented the last of the money they had saved since February. Sylvia had always kept this note in a pocket of her valise; now when she went up to their room to fetch it it was gone. The discovery of the loss was such a blow at this moment that she could not speak of it to Queenie when she came down-stairs again; she paid what was owing with the last halfpenny they had, and sat back revolving internally in her mind how, when, and where that five-hundred-franc note could possibly have been lost. Suddenly she had an idea that she might have moved it to another pocket and, leaving a half-smoked cigarette balanced against the saucer of her coffee-cup, she ran up-stairs again to verify the conjecture. Alas! it was the emptiest of conjectures, and in a fever of exasperation she searched wildly in all sorts of unlikely places for the missing money. When the bedroom was scattered with her clothes to no purpose, she went back to the dining-room, where she found that the waiter had taken the half-smoked cigarette in clearing away the coffee-cups. "Didn't you keep that cigarette?" she demanded. Queenie looked at her in surprise. "Why to keep a cigarette?" she asked. "Because I haven't another." "Well, ring for the waiter. He shall bring one for you." "No, no, it doesn't matter," Sylvia muttered; but the waste of that last precious cigarette brought home to her more than anything else that there was absolutely not even a halfpenny left in her purse after paying for the food they had had, and abruptly with the transmutation of that insignificant object to something of immense value arrived a corresponding change in Sylvia's attitude to the whole of life.