Sylvia felt her legs give way beneath her when she heard this piece of treachery. She longed to cry out to the woman with the lace that she had been betrayed, but already she had turned deathly pale at the approach of the officials. They were beckoning her to follow them to a kind of cabin, and she was moving toward it hopelessly. It was dreadful to see a poor woman so treated, and Sylvia looked round to find the man who had been the cause of it, but he had vanished. Half an hour afterward the woman of the lace wearily climbed into the compartment and took her seat with the rest; her eyes were red and she was still weeping bitterly. The others asked what had happened. "They found it on me," she moaned. "And now what shall I do? It was all we had in the world to pay the mortgage on our house. My poor husband is ill, very ill, and it was the only way to save him. I should have sold that lace for four thousand francs, and now they have confiscated it and we shall be fined one thousand francs. We haven't any money. It was everything--everything. We shall lose our house and our furniture, and my husband will die. Oh, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_" She rocked backward and forward in her grief; nothing that any one could say comforted her. Sylvia told how she had been betrayed; everybody execrated the spy and said how careful one should be to whom one spoke when traveling; but that did not help the poor woman, who sobbed more and more despairingly. At last the train came to its first stop in France, and the man that had denounced the poor woman suddenly jumped in, as they were starting again, and took his old seat. The fat gentleman next to Sylvia swelled with indignation; his veins stood out, and he shouted angrily at the man what a rascal he was. Everybody in the carriage joined in abusing him; and the poor woman herself wailed out her sad story and reproached him for the ruin he had brought upon her. As for Sylvia, she could not contain herself, but jumped up and with all her might kicked him on the shins, an action which made the fat gentleman shout: "_Bravo! Vas-y! Encore, la gosse! Bravo! Bis! Bis!"_ When the noise had subsided the man began to speak. "I regret infinitely, madame, the inconvenience to which I was unfortunately compelled to put you, but the fact is that I myself was carrying diamonds upon me to the value of more than two hundred thousand francs." He suddenly took out a wallet from his pocket and emptied the stones into his hand, where they lay sparkling in the dusty sunshine of the compartment. Everybody was silent with surprise for a moment; when they began to abuse him again, he trickled the diamonds back into the wallet and begged for attention. "How much have you lost, madame?" he inquired, very politely. The woman of the lace poured forth her woes for the twentieth time.