The clothes were still lying on the bed, the underwear and bed-linen on the floor, and close by were two brown stains, the blood that had flowed from her wound. The knife, too, was still there. Lilly restrained her desire to cry, shamed by the presence of the clerk, who stood there stupidly, whistling, with his lower lip thrust out. Lilly threw her clothes into the basket-trunk which her mother had intended to use in moving to the nine-room apartment, added a few pieces of underwear and some books chosen at random, and then looked around for mementos. Her brain was befogged. She saw everything and recognised nothing. But there on the table, there, bound with rubber bands, soaked in her blood, untouched because no one knew its value, lay the Song of Songs. Lilly snatched it up, shut down the trunk lid, and with the score under her arm, stepped out into the new life, hungry for experience. CHAPTER VI Mrs. Asmussen's two daughters had run away from home again. The whole neighbourhood knew it. Lilly had scarcely set foot in the dusky room smelling of dust and leather, where soiled volumes on pine shelves reached to the ceiling, when she, too, became acquainted with the fact. Mrs. Asmussen was a dignified dame, whom nature had endowed with gracious rotundity. She received Lilly at the entrance to her circulating library, and amid kisses and tears declared that even before seeing Lilly she had conceived a love for her such as she would cherish for a child of her own; and now that she had met her face to face she was completely bewitched. "And people speak of the cold world," thought Lilly, whom this sort of reception pleased very well. "What did I say--a child of my _own_? Nonsense! I love you more, much more, ever and ever and ever so much more. Daughters are venomous serpents, on whom love is wasted. They are parasites to be torn from one's breast--torn--" She stopped because the stupid clerk, who had accompanied Lilly in a cab, was shoving her trunk over the threshold. After he left Mrs. Asmussen continued: