my appearance in that quiet household was as agitating as
it was unexpected. "Et votre ordonnance?" she asked, with a glance at my
servant. "Non, il dort dans la caserne." "Bien!" she said, and with a
smile made me welcome.

It was soon evident that, my credentials being once established, I was
to be regarded as a member of the household, and nothing would satisfy
Madame but that I should be assured of this. Having shown me my bedroom,
with its pompous bed draped with a tent of curtains, she took me on a
tour of her _menage_. I was conducted into the kitchen, bright with
copper pans and the _marmite_--it was as sweet and clean as a dairy; the
resources of the still-room were displayed to me, and the confitures and
spices were not more remarkable than the domestic pharmacy in which the
herbs of the field had been distilled by Madame's own hands to yield
their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain
for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and
dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses
full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory
being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my
admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of
Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.

Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without
issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth,
as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that
_rentier_ class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town
which serves as G.H.Q.--a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and
which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of
quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth
Madame had kept a _pension_ and had had English demoiselles among her
charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of "Hyde Park."
Did I know it? She received my assurance with obvious gratification as
though it established a personal intimacy between us. "Avez-vous tue des
Allemands?" My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?" interjected the _bonne_, who, I
afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were
to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my
visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and