A stuffed bird stood upon a windless branch and through a window of blue and orange squares of glass a broken moon stared in.

A bedroom, formed from a sitting-room, a basin to wash in upon a red plush table—no glass, no jug, no lock upon the door. Instead, gilt mirrors, three bell ropes and a barometer. A bed with a mattress upon it and nothing more.

This was her kingdom.

Beyond, a town without lights, without a station, without a milkshop, without a meat shop, without sheets, without blankets, crockery, cooking pans, or locks upon the doors. A population half-fed and poor. A sky black as ink and liquid as a river.

Prisoners in the streets, moving in green-coated gangs; prisoners in the gutters, pushing long scoops to stay the everlasting tide of mud; thin, hungry, fierce and sad, green-coated prisoners like bedraggled parrots, out-numbered the population.

The candle of the world was snuffed out—and the wick smoked.

The light was gone—the blinding light of the Chantilly snows, the lights on the PrÉcy river—moonlight, sunlight—the little boat crossing at moonrise, sunrise.

"Ah, that long journey! How I pressed on, how I fled from Amiens!"

"What, not Charleville yet?" I said. "Isn't it Charleville soon? What hurry was there then to get there?"

The stuffed bird eyed her from his unstirring branch, and that yellow eye seemed to answer: "None, none…"

"This is his home; his country. He told me it was beautiful. But I cannot see beauty. I am empty of happiness. Where is the beauty?"

And the vile bird, winking in the candle's light, replied: "Nowhere."

But he lied.

Perhaps she had been sent, stuffed as he was, from Paris. Perhaps he had never flown behind the town, and seen the wild mountains that began at the last house on the other bank of the river. Or the river itself, greener than any other which flowed over black rocks, in cold gulleys —the jade-green Meuse flowing to Dinant, to Namur. Perhaps from his interminable boulevard he had never seen the lovely Spanish Square of red and yellow, its steep-roofed houses standing upon arches—or the proud Duc Charles de Gonzague who strutted for ever upon his pedestal, his stone cape slipping from one shoulder, his gay Spaniard's hat upon his head—holding back a smile from his handsome lips, lest the town which he had come over the mountains to found should see him tolerant and sin beneath his gaze.

That bird knew the rain would stop—knew it in his dusty feathers, but he would not kindle hope. He knew there was a yellow spring at hand—but he left her to mourn for the white lustre of Chantilly. Vile bird!… She blew out the candle that he might wink no more.

"To-morrow I will buy a padlock and a key. If among these gilt mirrors I can have no other charm, I will have solitude!" And having hung a thought, a plan, a hope before her in the future, she slept till day broke—the second day in Charleville.

* * * * *

She woke, a mixture of courage and philosophy.

"I can stand anything, and beyond a certain limit misfortune makes me laugh. But there's no reason why I should stand this!" The key and padlock idea was rejected as a compromise with happiness.

"No, no, let us see if we can get something better to lock up than that bird." He looked uncommonly dead by daylight.

"I would rather lock up an empty room, and leave it pure when I must leave it!"

Dressing, she went quickly down the street to the Bureau de la Place. The clerks and secretaries nodded and smiled at each other, and bent their heads over their typewriters when she looked at them.

"Can I see the billeting lieutenant?"

"He is not here."

"I saw him enter."

"We will go and see…."

She drummed upon the table with her fingers and the clerks and secretaries winked and nodded more meaningly than ever.

"Entrez, mademoiselle. He will see you."

The red-haired lieutenant with pince-nez was upon his feet looking at her curiously as she entered the adjoining room.

"Good morning, mademoiselle. There is something wrong with the billet that I found you yesterday?"

She looked at him. In his pale-blue eyes there was a beam; in his creased mouth there was an upward curve. The story of legitimate complaint that she had prepared drooped in her mind; she looked at him a little longer, hesitated, then, risking everything:

"Monsieur, there is a stuffed owl in the room."

He did not wince. "Take it out, mademoiselle."

"H'm, yes. I cannot see heaven except through orange glass."

"Open the window."

"It is fixed."

Then he failed her; he was a busy, sensible man.

"Mademoiselle, I find you a billet, I instal you, and you come to me in the middle of the morning with this ridiculous story of an owl. It isn't reasonable…."

The door opened and his superior officer walked in, a stern captain with no crease about his mouth, no beam in his olive eye.

Ah, now … Now the lieutenant had but to turn to his superior officer and she would indeed be rent, and reasonably so.

"What is the matter?" said the newcomer. "Is something fresh needed?"

The billeting lieutenant never hesitated a second.

"Mon capitaine, unfortunately the billet found yesterday for this lady is unsuitable. The owner of the house returns this week, and needs the room."

"Have you some other lodging for her?"

"Yes, mon capitaine, in the Rue de ClÈves."

"Good. Then there is no difficulty?"

"None. Follow me, mademoiselle, the street is near. I will take you to the concierge."

She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.

"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and susceptible."

"Oh, no, no…."

"Indeed, I am young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I came to Charleville…."

"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"

"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the window. Here is the street."

"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and how delighted. Is the house here?"

"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. It is an empty house."

"So much the better."

"But you are not afraid?"

"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"

"Very little. We will see."

He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "Eh bien! More officers? I told you, mon lieutenant, we have not room for one more."

"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this time. Have you the key?"

"But the house opposite is empty."

"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."

"Alone?"

"Of course."

The young concierge, under the impression that he was certainly installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with a look of impish reproof in her eyes.

Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard, leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led up into the house.

"All this … all this mine?"

"All yours, mademoiselle."

The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues, arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.

"Who lived here?"

"Who lived here?" echoed the concierge, and a strange look passed over her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans…."

"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"

"All the time. I knew them all."

In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."

"Who is the owner?"

"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She has turned mÉchante. She will abuse me when she comes here to see this—as though I could have saved it. Her husband and her son were killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the war, and Phillippe … I don't know when, but somewhere near here."

"You think she will come back?"

"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the sun … was the good God to her."

"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here in this empty house? There will be rats…."

"I can be very happy—and so grateful. I will move my things across to-day. My companions … that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy from Chantilly to-morrow."

"Six more! Had you told me that before … But what more simple! I can put them all in here. There is room for twenty."

"Oh…." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house for myself. And I was so happy!"

"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your sex every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you cannot lodge with your compatriots!…"

"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"

"I was joking. Take the house—the rats and the rubbish included with it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"

"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."

He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the concierge.

"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life." Fanny agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other furniture.

"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the house opposite."

She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the road. Fanny fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six logs and some twigs from the concierge, promising to fetch her an ample store from the hills around.

All day she rummaged in the empty house—finding now a three-legged armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian glass scrolled in gold for her tooth glass.

In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.

It covered her oak bed exactly—and by removing the pillows it looked like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.

A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.

But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy's things were everywhere, the father's and the son's. Her eyes took in the host of relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their youth, pressing among phantoms.

"Irons … For ironing! For my collars!"

But they were so small, too small. His again—the son's. "Yet why shouldn't I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon one finger.

Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as though nothing had ever been packed up—dolls' houses, rocking-horses, slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.

Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here … how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah … inhuman… was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed in a thin glass upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the house, from her solitude?