his the party certainly looked cleaner than before.

The first house they came to was a little white house with green
shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down
each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow
in; but all the flowers were dead now.

Along one side of the house was a sort of wide veranda, built of poles
and trellis-work, and a vine crawled all over it. It was wider than our
English verandas, and Anthea thought it must look lovely when the
green leaves and the grapes were there; but now there were only dry,
reddish-brown stalks and stems, with a few withered leaves caught in
them.

The children walked up to the front door. It was green and narrow. A
chain with a handle hung beside it, and joined itself quite openly to a
rusty bell that hung under the porch. Cyril had pulled the bell and
its noisy clang was dying away before the terrible thought came to all.
Cyril spoke it.

'My hat!' he breathed. 'We don't know any French!'

At this moment the door opened. A very tall, lean lady, with pale
ringlets like whitey-brown paper or oak shavings, stood before them. She
had an ugly grey dress and a black silk apron. Her eyes were small
and grey and not pretty, and the rims were red, as though she had been
crying.

She addressed the party in something that sounded like a foreign
language, and ended with something which they were sure was a question.
Of course, no one could answer it.

'What does she say?' Robert asked, looking down into the hollow of his
jacket, where the Phoenix was nestling. But before the Phoenix could
answer, the whitey-brown lady's face was lighted up by a most charming
smile.

'You--you ar-r-re fr-r-rom the England!' she cried. 'I love so much
the England. Mais entrez--entrez donc tous! Enter, then--enter all. One
essuyes his feet on the carpet.' She pointed to the mat.

'We only wanted to ask--'

'I shall say you all that what you wish,' said the lady. 'Enter only!'

So they all went in, wiping their feet on a very clean mat, and putting
the carpet in a safe corner of the veranda.

'The most beautiful days of my life,' said the lady, as she shut the
door, 'did pass themselves in England. And since long time I have not
heard an English voice to repeal me the past.'

This warm welcome embarrassed every one, but most the boys, for the
floor of the hall was of such very clean red and white tiles, and
the floor of the sitting-room s