I wanted to say “_Et tu, Brute!_” but I didn’t. When one came to think of it, I had no very good reason to advance for having appeared at Bleau. It wasn’t the sort of place into which one would drop from the skies by pure chance, either. I was lucky to find a ready-made explanation. “But assuredly,” said I. She disappeared into the kitchen, returned immediately with a candle, and led me up the stone staircase on the left of the courtyard, talking volubly all the while. “We have had many artists here,” she declared; “many friends of monsieur, doubtless. Since monsieur is of that fine profession, his room will be but four francs daily; his dinner, three francs; his little breakfast, a franc alone.” “Madame,” I responded, “it is plain that the high cost of living, which terrorizes my country, does not exist at Bleau.” Equally plain, I thought pessimistically, was the explanation. My saddest forebodings were realized; if the name of the hotel meant anything and three kings ever tarried here, that conjunction of sovereigns had put up with housing of a distinctly primitive sort. My room was clean, I acknowledged thankfully, but that was all I could say for it. I eyed the bowl and pitcher gloomily, the hard-looking bed, the tiny square of carpeting in the center of the stone floor. “Your house, Madame,” I suggested craftily, with a view to reconnoissance, “is, of course, full?” She heaved a sigh. “It is war-time, Monsieur,” she lamented. “None travel now. Yet why should I mourn, since I make enough to keep me till the war is ended and my man comes home? There are those who eat here daily at the noon hour--the cure, the mayor, the mayor’s secretary, sometimes the notary of the town, as well. And to-night I have two guests, monsieur and the young lady--the nurse who goes to the hospital at Carrefonds with the great new remedy for burns and scars. _Au revoir, Monsieur_. In one little moment I will send the hot water, and in half an hour monsieur shall dine.” I closed the door behind her and flung down my bag, fuming. So Miss Falconer was a nurse, carrying a panacea to the wounded, doubtless a specimen of the sensational new remedy just recognized by the medical authorities, of which the one newspaper I had glanced through in Paris had been full. The masquerade was too preposterous to gain an instant’s credence. It gave me, as the French say, furiously to think; it resolved all doubts. I felt inexplicably angry, then preternaturally cool and competent. For the first time since the Modane episode I was my clear-sighted self. I had been trying futilely to blindfold my eyes, to explain the inexplicable, to be unaware of the obvious. Now with a sort of grim relief I looked the facts in the face.