"I assure you that this cannot have been on the day my friend left Lacville," said Mrs. Bailey quickly. "Madame Wolsky left on a Saturday afternoon. As I told you just now, Madame Wachner expected her to supper, but she never came. She went to Paris instead." The servant looked at her fixedly, and Sylvia's face became what it seldom was--very forbidding in expression. She wished this meddling, familiar woman would go away and leave her alone. "No doubt Madame knows best! One day is like another to me. I beg Madame's pardon." The Frenchwoman took up her parasol and laid the house key on the table, then, with a "_Bon jour, Madame, et encore merci bien!_" she noisily closed the door behind her. A moment later, Sylvia, with a sense of relief, found herself in sole possession of the Chalet des Muguets. * * * * * Even the quietest, the most commonplace house has, as it were, an individuality that sets it apart from other houses. And even those who would deny that proposition must admit that every inhabited dwelling has its own special nationality. The Chalet des Muguets was typically French and typically suburban; but where it differed from thousands of houses of the same type, dotted round in the countrysides within easy reach of Paris, was that it was let each year to a different set of tenants. In Sylvia Bailey's eyes the queer little place lacked all the elements which go to make a home; and, sitting there, in that airless, darkened dining-room, she wondered, not for the first time, why the Wachners chose to live in such a comfortless way. She glanced round her with distaste. Everything was not only cheap, but common and tawdry. Still, the dining-room, like all the other rooms in the chalet, was singularly clean, and almost oppressively neat. There was the round table at which she and Anna Wolsky had been so kindly entertained, the ugly buffet or sideboard, and in place of the dull parquet floor she remembered on her first visit lay an ugly piece of linoleum, of which the pattern printed on the surface simulated a red and blue marble pavement. Once more the change puzzled her, perhaps unreasonably. At last Sylvia got up from the hard cane chair on which she had been sitting. There had come over her, in the half-darkness, a very peculiar sensation--an odd feeling that there was something alive in the room. She looked down, half expecting to see some small animal crouching under the table, or hiding by the walnut-wood buffet behind her. But, no; nothing but the round table, and the six chairs stiffly placed against the wall, met her eyes. And yet, still that feeling that there was in the room some sentient creature besides herself persisted. She opened the door giving into the hall, and walked through the short passage which divided the house into two portions, into the tiny "salon."