Months passed. Miss von Schwertfeger ceased to write. Lilly's money gave out. The little treasure of trinkets dwindled rapidly. The lodging houses to which she moved grew ever more modest. Chilian attachés and Greek trafficers were replaced by bankrupt real estate agents and unemployed bank clerks, who wanted to solace her in her loneliness by spending the evenings with her. And the women who came in soiled kimonos to pay her neighbourly visits cast greedy glances at the few brooches, bracelets and rings she still had left. So Lilly determined to make an end of this life. CHAPTER II One of the best of the "best rooms" in Berlin which are to be found in houses having once known those renowned better days and which are let out to decent young women for thirty marks, including service and breakfast, was to be had from the widow Clothilde Laue. It contained red plush furniture, which embodied the acme of good taste at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. It contained a pier glass fantastically stuck from top to bottom with New Year's cards, cards of congratulation, and illustrated advertisements of soaps and powders. It contained photographs on the walls of actors once famous, whose fame in the meantime had faded no less than the autographs they had written beneath their pictures. It contained a washstand, whose marble top was covered with a tidy embroidered with the sententious couplet: To keep your body clean, be sure To have your conscience just as pure. It contained photograph albums, card-cases, a cigar clip in the shape of a windmill of olive wood, a green glass punch bowl, and a shaky pine bed modestly hidden behind blue woolen portières. It contained, finally, hung over the sofa in a gilt-edged glass case, a mysterious round creation. The thing consisted of six strips of paper braided together and radiating from a common centre. It was covered with gauze, beneath which the outline of pressed flowers could dimly be distinguished. It was in this best room on Neanderstrasse, four flights up, over a china shop, a piano-renting establishment, and a "repair studio," from the windows of which room an oblique view was to be obtained of the greenish grey waves of the Engelbecken, and into which a broad expanse of genuine Berlin smoky sky actually shone, that Lilly one day landed. Mrs. Laue was a woman of fifty, worn out by overwork, with a face like a dried apple, and great staring, tearful eyes. She circled about Lilly in incredulous admiration, as if unable to comprehend that so much brilliance and beauty had strayed into her home. The very day of her arrival Lilly was informed of her history. Her husband had been cashier and bookkeeper at one of the favorite variety theatres in Berlin, and twenty years before had departed this world, leaving her without home or protection. There was no rosy glamour to glorify tears wept in solitude, no comic songs to drown the cry of hunger.