Now all was changed.

I used to cry myself to sleep up in my little room, wondering whether I would ever have friends.

You see, I was quite young--only eighteen--and I wanted to live." A change came in a few months, but a disastrous change.

The modiste failed.

Celia was thrown out of work, and could get nothing to do.
Gradually she pawned what clothes she could spare; and then there came a morning when she had a single five-franc piece in the world and owed a month's rent for her room.