Eustace wondered whether the little _ménagère_ and the lady who called to the dog were one and the same person. It was very foolish of him to wish that it might be so, and to imagine that the person must needs be young and beautiful. But then poetical three-and-twenty is subject to such foolish wishes and imaginings. Theodore de Bergerac and his secretary went into the house, where lights began to glimmer here and there in the dusk. The room into which the Frenchman led Eustace had that sweet rustic charm peculiar to country drawing-rooms; but the stranger fancied it had a certain harmonious beauty which he had never beheld in any other apartment. _Every_ thing in it was beautiful. There were no false forms, no discordant tones lurking here and there to mar the harmony of the general effect. No pert young Cupid in Parian folded his mis-shapen wings, or uplifted his insolent pug nose before the outraged beholder--no hideous form of modern vase or flower-pot--no gaudy abomination of cheap Bohemian glass offended the eye; no impossible roses and lilies in Berlin-wool and bead-work offered themselves as a flowery couch for the visitor’s repose. A subdued harmony of form and colour pervaded every object. The valuable books scattered lavishly in every direction made no parade of their costliness. The rare old china needed examination before its beauty revealed itself. Everything was fresh and pure and delicate. There was a perfume of many flowers mingled with the subtle aroma of Russia-leather bindings, very pleasant to the stranger’s nostrils. New though the place was to him, he had no sense of strangeness; he felt rather as if he had come home to some delicious and familiar resting-place for which he had long been yearning. Perhaps this feeling may have been a vague foreshadowing of his fate. Perhaps he had a faint semi-consciousness of the fact that perfect happiness was to come to him in that house. The two men sat for some little time in the dimly-lighted room--lighted only by a pair of small wax candles in antique bronze candle-sticks. They talked of many things, gliding imperceptibly from one subject to another without either jerks or pauses in the smooth current of talk. De Bergerac was a delightful talker--playful and serious, gay and earnest by turns--now childishly emphatic about trifles, now touching the profoundest subjects with a graceful lightness. Eustace was charmed by his new employer, and began to think that his lines had fallen in pleasant places. He may have been still more inclined to think so a few minutes later, when a trim little maid-servant announced that supper was ready, and M. de Bergerac led him into the dining-room.