Now, however, that I spent all my evenings in my own quiet room, I became, by imperceptible degrees, interested in the unseen inhabitant of the adjoining apartment.  Sometimes, when the house was so still that the very turning of the page sounded unnaturally loud, and the mere falling of a cinder startled me, I heard her in her chamber, singing softly to herself.  Every night I saw the light from her window streaming out over the balcony and touching the evergreens with a midnight glow.  Often and often, when it was so late that even I had given up study and gone to bed, I heard her reading aloud, or pacing to and fro to the measure of her own recitations.  Listen as I would, I could only make out that these recitations were poetical fragments—­I could only distinguish a certain chanted metre, the chiming of an occasional rhyme, the rising and falling of a voice more than commonly melodious.

This vague interest gave place by-and-by to active curiosity.  I resolved to question Madame Bouisse, the concierge; and as she, good soul! loved gossip not wisely, but too well, I soon knew all the little she had to tell.

Mademoiselle Hortense, it appeared, was the enigma of the third story.  She had resided in the house for more than two years.  She earned her living by her labor; went out teaching all the day; sat up at night, studying and writing; had no friends; received no visitors; was as industrious as a bee, and as proud as a princess.  Books and flowers were her only friends, and her only luxuries.  Poor as she was, she was continually filling her shelves with the former, and supplying her balcony with the latter.  She lived frugally, drank no wine, was singularly silent and reserved, and “like a real lady,” said the fat concierge, “paid her rent to the minute.”

This, and no more, had Madame Bouisse to tell.  I had sought her in her own little retreat at the foot of the public staircase.  It was a very wet afternoon, and under pretext of drying my boots by the fire, I stayed to make conversation and elicit what information I could.  Now Madame Bouisse’s sanctuary was a queer, dark, stuffy little cupboard devoted to many heterogeneous uses, and it “served her for parlor, kitchen, and all.”  In one corner stood that famous article of furniture which became “a bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.”  Adjoining the bed was the fireplace; near the fireplace stood a corner cupboard filled with crockery and surmounted by a grand ormolu clock, singularly at variance with the rest of the articles.  A table, a warming-pan, and a couple of chairs completed the furniture of the room, which, with all its contents, could scarcely have measured more than eight feet square.  On a shelf inside the door stood thirty flat candlesticks; and on a row of nails just beneath them, hung two and twenty bright brass chamber-door keys—­whereby an apt arithmetician might have divined that exactly two-and-twenty lodgers were out in the rain, and only eight housed comfortably within doors.