was this cat now moving so stealthily across her line of vision!

20“The front door is to the right,” said the driver.

20

They walked along the terrace, and Lily began to feel very much distressed and worried. Supposing the Count and Aunt Cosy had gone off on a week-end visit? Would their servants have left the house entirely alone? She feared the answer to this question might easily be “Yes.”

The entrance to La Solitude was just a plain, green-painted door let into the bare house wall.

M. Popeau rang the old-fashioned iron bell-pull, and its strident tone seemed to tear across the intense stillness which enveloped them; and then they waited what seemed to all three a considerable time.

“I think,” said M. Popeau, smiling suddenly all over his fat, pale, good-natured face, “that you will be compelled to come back with me and eat that good luncheon ordered by Captain Stuart, Miss Fairfield!”

But even as he said the words the door opened slowly, and an old woman, dressed very neatly in a faded blue print dress, with a yellow silk bandana handkerchief tightly wound round her head, stood, unsmiling, before them.

M. Popeau took command.

“This young lady has just arrived from England to stay with the Comte and Comtesse Polda,” he said pleasantly.

“We did not expect the lady till the day after to-morrow. Please come this way.”

She spoke quite civilly, but there was no glimmer of welcome on her thin, drawn-looking face. M. Popeau noticed that her intonation was pleasantly refined.

The driver put down, just inside the door, the luggage he had been carrying, and went off back to his taxi, while Lily and M. Popeau followed the old woman down the corridor. She opened a door to the left, and stood aside for the strangers to pass through into what seemed at first a completely darkened room. But with the words, “I will go and tell Madame la Comtesse you are here,” she went and drew up one of the opaque yellow blinds.

Lily Fairfield, tired, hungry as she was, looked round with 21an eager sensation of curiosity, and, to tell the truth, she was exceedingly surprised and interested by what she saw.

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