The lower floor had been "done" in peacock blue and gold when Miss Enid made her debut twenty years before, and it had never been undone. An embossed dado and an even more embossed frieze encircled the walls, and the ceiling was a complicated mosaic of color and design. The stiff-backed chairs and massive sofas were apparently committed for life to linen strait-jackets. Heavy velvet curtains shut out the light and a faint smell of coal soot permeated the air. Over the hall fireplace hung a large portrait of Madam Bartlett, just inside the drawing-room gleamed a marble bust of her, and two long pier-glasses kept repeating the image of her until she dominated every nook and corner of the place. But Quin saw little of all this. To him the house was simply a background for images of Eleanor: Eleanor coming down the broad stairs in her blue and gray costume; Eleanor tripping through the hall in her Red Cross uniform; Eleanor standing in the doorway in the moonlight, telling him how wonderful he was. He had written her exactly ten letters since her departure, but only two had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he laboriously made another copy, addressed a second envelope, then inadvertently mailed both. He had received such a scoffing note in reply that his ears tingled even now as he thought of it. It was only when he recalled the postscript that he found consolation. "How funny that you should get a position at Bartlett & Bangs's," she had written. "If you should happen to meet any member of my family, for heaven's sake don't mention my name. They might link you up with the Hawaiian Garden, or the trip to the camp that night grandmother was hurt. Just let our friendship be a little secret between you and me." "'You and me,'" Quin repeated the words softly to himself, as he stood there among the objects made sacred by her one-time presence. "Madam Bartlett wishes you to come upstairs and explain the papers before she signs them," said a woman in nurse's uniform from the stair landing, and, cap in hand, Quin followed her up the steps. At the open door of the large front room he paused. Lying in royal state in a huge four-poster bed was Madam Bartlett, resplendent in a purple robe, with her hair dressed in its usual elaborate style, and in her ears pearls that, Quin afterward assured the Martels, looked like moth-balls. "You go on out of here and stay until I ring for you," she snapped at the nurse; then she squinted her eyes and looked at Quin. She did not put on her eye-glasses; they were reserved for feminine audiences exclusively.