Mademoiselle Pouchée put the interruption quietly aside. ‘Mère loses her memory. We must not always heed her,’ she observed to Marjorie, presently. ‘In bygone days, when the good papa was living, our family received undergraduates as lodgers. Mère has the old time in her heart still.’ ‘Jesuitry, Pouchée! I remember your talents in that line. In bygone days, when the good papa was living, no photograph of Tintajeux Manoir existed.’ The remark was accompanied by a Bartrand look, as familiar, as smiting to poor Pouchée as though she and Marjorie had done battle over some delicate point of moral faithfulness that very morning. ‘There are accidents--contingencies--nay, times being hard, there is necessity. As well confess the truth. We do not take lodgers.’ Pouchée’s eyes dwelt fondly on the inlaid cabinet, the porcelain, the exquisite order of the little salon. ‘We are private citizens--rentières, living on our means.’ ‘And there is no one in the house save yourselves?’ A flourish of Pouchée’s fingers hinted negation. ‘The old place is, in fact, two houses, as you will see by daylight. There are rooms at the back that can be entered by a flight of open-air steps--steps dating from the fourteenth century, ma mie.’ ‘You promised me truth--not history, Mademoiselle.’ ‘And by hazard--for the moment--we have a locataire. Not an undergraduate. We spare a room or two, on occasion, to some quiet gentleman--some resident M.A.--some student from the Art Schools. No undergraduate sets foot within our doors. _We are not licensed._’ So keen a sense of distinction was conveyed by the italicised words that Marjorie forebore from further questioning. An hour later, however, when they were parting for the night in the fresh, chintz-draped attic which was the guest-chamber of the house, she ventured on a last surmise. ‘As we passed a certain baize door at the turning of the stairs I smelt the smell of a pipe. Our bon locataire must live somewhere in that neighbourhood, Mademoiselle--our quiet gentleman, who is not an undergraduate, and who has the photograph of Tintajeux Manoir on his walls?’ But Pouchée was blankly uncommunicative. The gentleman went in and out by the other staircase. Marjorie would neither see nor hear him during her stay in Cambridge. As to the photograph--it would certainly return to its place in the salon to-morrow morning. ‘If you are afraid of University ghosts,’ added the Frenchwoman, as she bade her guest a final good-night, ‘you will do wisely to bolt your door. Sleep well, ma mie, and dream that we are making cowslip balls, as we used a dozen years ago, in the woods of Tintajeux.’