I put on my furs, and we went down to Cressida’s carriage, waiting below.  She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feeling her throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not going to talk.  We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it was growing dark.  The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person who took Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed.  Cressida’s incognito was never successful.  Her black gown was inconspicuous enough, but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with fur and furred at the cuffs and collar.  The Frenchwoman’s eye ran over it delightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half-concealed the well-known face behind it.  She insisted upon conducting us up to the fourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets in the dark, musty-smelling halls.  I suspect that she tarried outside the door after we sent the nurse for her walk.

We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better days which this lodging house must have seen.  The grimy red plush carpet, the red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to comfort in their time.  The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an ill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under the cracked marble.  The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, pinned together and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames.

I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka.  Her carriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from a protective impulse, or because there was no place else to put it.  After she had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down and drew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasure and stroking the velvet with his long fingers. “Couleur de gloire, couleur des reines!” I heard him murmur.  He thrust the sleeve under his chin and closed his eyes.  His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in the room.  If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle.

The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with her eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls.  Occasionally we heard a call for “de l’eau chaude!” and the heavy trot of a serving woman on the stairs.  On the floor below somebody was struggling with Schubert’s Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright piano.  Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot screaming, “Voila, voila, tonnerre!” The house was built before 1870, as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.  The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them.