entleman who could pay; and although she was too
honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the
coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the
joys of hospitality.

Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor
and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with
pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness
with a day of miserable coughing.

At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five
autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.

Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and
compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless
before he put in his word.

"Madame has not been many years in these parts?" he inquired in his best
French.

Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts
from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic
village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously
in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.

"But this hotel," said Roger, "has not stood here so long?"

"_Ma foi_!" said she, "since I can remember, when I used to visit my
good uncle here every Sunday, I remember `L'Hotel Soult.' Why, when I
married my cousin and became _Madame l'hotesse_, it was all fields
between us and Paris. Yes, and little enough change about the house.
We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate. By a miracle we
escaped the German shells. Ah! a merry time was the year of the war!
France suffered, alas! but the `L'Hotel Soult' prospered. 'Twas the
year I was left a widow! I had ten waiters then, Monsieur, and two
billiard-markers, a _chef_ from the best kitchen in Paris, and stables,
and _chambrieres_, and--why, Monsieur, the wages of one week were
twenty--twenty-five napoleons!"

"That was after the war?" asked Roger.

"Yes. Before that I had more. But, alas! they left me for the field,
and came no more."

"Were all your waiters Frenchmen?" asked Roger.

Madame stared curiously at the questioner.

"Why do you ask? I have had many kinds. Some English, like Monsieur."

"A year or two after the war," said Roger, "there was an Englishman, a
relation of mine, who was a waiter in an hotel in one of the suburbs
south of Paris. I want to hear of him. I have hunted for weeks. I
could hear nothing of him. I came