We went back downstairs, and concluded an agreement. I was to take the house for the summer. Madame Leroux would cook for me. Monsieur Leroux would drive into Dieppe on Wednesday to fetch me and my luggage out. On Wednesday we had been driving for something like half an hour without speaking, when all at once Leroux said to me, “That room, Monsieur, the room you thought was occupied——” “Yes?” I questioned, as he paused. “I have a proposition to make,” said he. He spoke, as it seemed to me, half shyly, half doggedly, gazing the while at the ears of his horse. “What is it?” I asked. “If you will leave that room as it is, with the things in it, we will make a reduction in the rent. If you will let us keep it as it is?” he repeated, with a curious pleading intensity. “You are alone. The house will be big enough for you without that room, will it not, Monsieur?” Of course, I consented at once. If they wished to keep the room as it was, they were to do so, by all means. “Thank you, thank you very much. My wife will be grateful to you,” he said. For a little while longer we drove on without speaking. Presently, “You are our first tenant. We have never let the house before,” he volunteered. “Ah? Have you had it long?” I asked. “I built it. I built it, five, six, years ago,” said he. Then, after a pause, he added, “I built it for my daughter.” His voice sank, as he said this. But one felt that it was only the beginning of something he wished to say. I invited him to continue by an interested, “Oh?” “You see what we are, my wife and I,” he broke out suddenly. “We are rough people, we are peasants. But my daughter, sir”—he put his hand on my knee, and looked earnestly into my face—“my daughter was as fine as satin, as fine as lace.”