She hailed a passing carriage, drove to the Hotel Bête, took her luggage to the Gare du Nord, and left it there. Then as she stood on the station step, she felt something in her hand. It was the fat letter addressed to Madame Gautier. And she knew it was fat with bank notes. She unfastened her dress and thrust the letter into her bosom, buttoning the dress carefully over it. "But I won't go to my hotel yet," she said. "I won't even look for one. I'll see Paris a bit first." She hailed a coachman. "Go," she said, "to some restaurant in the Latin Quarter--where the art students eat." "And I'm alone in Paris, and perfectly free," said Betty, leaning back on the cushions. "No, I won't tell my coachman to drive along the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, wherever that is. Oh, it is glorious to be perfectly free. Oh, poor Madame Gautier! Oh dear, oh dear!" She held her breath and wondered why she could feel sorry. "You are a wretch," she said, "poor Madame was kind to you in her hard narrow way, and now is she lying cold and dead, all broken up by that cruel motor car." The horror of the picture helped by Betty's excitement brought the tears and she encouraged them. "It is something to find one is not entirely heartless," she said at last, drying her eyes, as the carriage drew up at a place where there were people and voices and many lights. CHAPTER X. SEEING LIFE. The thoughts of the two who loved her were with Betty that night. The aunt, shaken, jolted, enduring much in the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean express thought fondly of her. "She's a nice little thing. I must take her about a bit," she mused, and even encouraged her fancy to play with the idea of a London season--a thing it had not done for years. The Reverend Cecil, curtains drawn and lamp alight, paused to think of her even in the midst of his first thorough examination of his newest treasure in Seventeenth Century Tracts, "The Man Mouse baited and trapped for nibbling the margins of Eugenius Philalethes, being an assault on Henry Moore." It was bound up with, "The Second Wash, or the Moore scoured again," and a dozen others. A dumpy octavo, in brown leather, he had found it propping a beer barrel in the next village. "Dear Lizzie!--I wonder if she will ever care for really important things. There must be treasures upon treasures in those boxes on the French quays that one reads about. But she never would learn to know one type from another." He studied the fire thoughtfully. "I wonder if she does understand how much she is to me," he thought. "Those are the things that are better unsaid. At least I always think so when she's here. But all these months--I wonder whether girls like you to _say things_, or to leave them to be understood. It is more delicate not to say them, perhaps."