She thought of all the long succession of shabby hotel rooms and disreputable lodgings that she had passed through. Somehow they had not mattered because they had been so utterly impersonal, a few months in a back street, a week in a Palace by the sea, a hasty escape to a tiny dirty room up a broken stairway, a little hut that had been lent them by a lake and then back again to the towns.
Oh, those towns. All looking the same and all to her father had meant only one thing – a casino, green baize tables, the clink of money and the shuffle of the cards.
She wondered now how she had managed to carry on for so long. At first it had been different because there had been money coming regularly from England. She did not know whether it was a pension, she thought it must be, or a remittance from
