of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel
really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold,
original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt
something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling
and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it
seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep--a little dim
cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon
the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think
of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed
padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets
could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest that
surrounded him.

On engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who
seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with
Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards
him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little
promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress
herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to
swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But
she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her
body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and
alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair
against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her
as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the
same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch
occurred to him.

She took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite
without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple
in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and
the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.

"But when she looked at me, you know," said Vezin, with that little
apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture
of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, "the odd notion came to
me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and
that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of
that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse."

He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his