A woman was passing with a little dog on a leash; the woman gave her a look of disgust and averted her face.

All Mina could think about then was calling home. She could hear her father’s voice. But when she finally found a telephone, she couldn’t make the operator understand: she tried again and again, wasting time.

Then another idea came to her that had been there at the back of her mind all along. That man and woman she had overheard in the rue St. Séverin: she knew the man’s name because the woman had used it. She knew the name of their hotel—the St. Vincent. Mina was sure she also knew who they were: she’d figured it out during the night. They were private detectives hired by her father. For all she knew, her father might be with them in Paris right now, looking for her, searching for her.

Mina had no idea where she was, or where the St. Vincent was.

She kept stopping passersby to ask them, but when they saw her clothes and her bare feet and her dyed hair, and when they smelled the vomit and saw the tears, their faces closed up. They didn’t want to know; they’d start turning away, and when she tried to catch hold of them and plead, they’d get angry and shake her off.

She could have gone to a policeman, of course. She saw two as she staggered then ran the last few yards of a street called the boulevard St. Michel; they were standing in the wide, busy street beyond, which was filled with traffic. She looked at the river beyond that. A bus hissed past her, very close. Mina jumped back, terrified. No, she thought, not the police. She didn’t want Star to be harmed, arrested; she wanted him to be stopped and helped. She wanted him to be taken to a doctor, to some quiet, soothing, hospital place.

No, not the police, she thought, and scurried across the street to the bridge, weaving between the hooting cars. Even then, when she was on the bridge, she didn’t see it. A woman she stopped, a woman kinder than the rest, turned and pointed it out.

“Mais, il est là,” she said. “En face, vous voyez…”

And then, seeing Mina had not understood even this simple statement, she took her by the shoulders and pointed. And Mina saw it—a huge gray castle of a place: the St. Vincent; the name was written in curly bronze writing, huge letters, just above its entrance.

It all took so long, Mina thought. Every second seemed a minute, every minute an hour. Even when she was finally safe in some assistant manager’s office, even when the man called Rowland finally appeared, she could not seem to make him understand.

“Oh, hurry,” she cried, “you must hurry. He’s going in as a student, that’s what he plans. He has his admission ticket, he showed it to me. And he’s ill. He didn’t hurt me, you mustn’t think that. But he needs a doctor, and—”