“Give it to me.  I will put it in front of the clock on the mantelpiece.”

And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room.  She did so with a little gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a whole.

The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light.  The rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness.  There was a garage close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not.  The bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better.  G.J. in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it was too much and too heavily furnished.  Not at all.  She adored the cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an interior—­inside something.  She gloried in the flat.  She preferred it even to her memory of G.J.’s flat in the Albany.  Its golden ornateness flattered her.  The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her.  She had never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like it.  But then Gilbert was always better than his word.

He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith.  Judiciously, she had never made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs. Carlos Smith in the tenancy.  And when Gilbert told her that he had had his eye on the flat for her before Mrs. Carlos Smith took it, and had hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud.  And reassured also.  For this detail was a proof that Gilbert had really had the intention to put her “among her own furniture” long before the night of the supreme appeal to him....  Only he was always so cautious.

And Gilbert was the discoverer of la mere Gaston, too, and as frank about her as about the flat.  La mere Gaston was the widow of a French soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her.  A few weeks earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding had fallen ill for a space, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as charwoman to aid Mrs. Braiding’s young sister in the Albany flat.  With excellent judgment Gilbert had chosen her to succeed Marthe, whom he himself had reproachfully dismissed from Cork Street.