After a sketchy and unsatisfactory _déjeuner_, during which appetite and peace were alike annihilated by that dread pronouncement of Madame Bontemps "inveigling the fiancé and breaking the heart of an innocent young girl," ringing through her brain, Ermengarde, renouncing her intention of looking for quarters in Mentone, and thinking that San Remo would now be the nearest place in which she could venture to hide her diminished head and reflect upon the spitefulness of perverse fate, fled upstairs to her room to take counsel of solitude. But in this she was balked before reaching her sanctuary by the encounter of Mrs. Boundrish, round-eyed and in very unfinished toilet, hurrying along the corridor in the greatest perturbation. "Oh dear, Mrs. Allonby!" she cried in agitated _accellerando_ that admitted of no stops, "what _shall_ I do? Dorris is in _such_ a state. I can't make anything of her. She was never taken like this before and this dreadful spotted fever about nobody knows how it begins but of course their poor brains and foreign doctors and chiefly the young and they go off so soon and so infectious and Boundrish at Nice oh dear! She won't speak." "But _is_ she spotted?" Ermengarde asked solemnly. "She won't say; she won't speak," the poor woman sobbed, and Agatha, arriving then, bore her back to her room, while Ermengarde, hastily upsetting eau-de-Cologne in every direction, and holding a handkerchief soaked in it to her face to keep off infection, stole into the chamber of the unfortunate Dorris, trying to remember when and where and how the spots characterizing this terrible disease were to be expected. Dorris had flung herself face downwards on her bed, and was sobbing faintly; the room was in great disorder, drawers open and clothing tossed recklessly about. Some scraps of torn paper, an open blotting-book, and pens and ink on the table, pointed to the writing and tearing up of letters. At the sound of Ermengarde's cautious entrance the poor girl turned quickly, showing a tear-washed, wild-eyed and miserable, but quite spotless, face. "Go away, go away! Oh, why can't I die?" she cried wildly, turning back to her original posture, while Ermengarde, carefully keeping the handkerchief to her face, felt her pulse and touched her brow softly, and asked where the pain was and what was the matter. "And you can ask?" she moaned, "when you were there, and as bad as any of them. Somebody might have told me--privately--I didn't know. They all hate and despise me. I can never--never--nev-nev--never----"