But she allowed Sylvia to follow her into the bright, clean little kitchen, of which the door was just opposite the drawing-room.

“What a charming little cuisine!” cried Sylvia smiling.  She was glad to find something that she could honestly praise, and the kitchen was, in truth, the pleasantest place in the house, exquisitely neat, with the brass batterie de cuisine shining and bright.  “Your day servant must be an exceptionally clean woman.”

“Yes,” said Madame Wachner, in a rather dissatisfied tone, “she is well enough.  But, oh, those French people, how eager they are for money!  Do you suppose that woman ever stays one minute beyond her time?  No, indeed!”

Even as she spoke she was pouring water into a little kettle, and lighting a spirit lamp.  Then, going to a cupboard, she took out two cups and a cracked china teapot.

Sylvia did her part by cutting some bread and butter, and, as she stood at the white table opposite the kitchen window, she saw that beyond the small piece of garden which lay at the back of the house was a dense chestnut wood, only separated from the Chalet des Muguets by a straggling hedge.

“Does the wood belong to you, too?” she asked.

Madame Wachner shook her head.

“Oh! no,” she said, “that is for sale!”

“You must find it very lonely here at night,” said Sylvia, musingly, “you do not seem to have any neighbours either to the right or left.”

“There is a villa a little way down the road,” said Madame Wachner quickly.  “But we are not nervous people—­and then we ’ave nothing it would be worth anybody’s while to steal.”

Sylvia reminded herself that the Wachners must surely have a good deal of money in the house if they gambled as much as Anna Wolsky said they did.  Her hostess could not keep it all in the little bag which she always carried hung on her wrist.

And then, as if Madame Wachner had seen straight into her mind, the old woman said significantly.  “As to our money, I will show you where we keep it.  Come into my bed-room; perhaps you will take off your hat there; then we shall be what English people call ‘cosy.’”

Madame Wachner led the way again into the short passage, and so into a large bed-room, which looked, like the kitchen, on to the back garden.

After the kitchen, this bed-room struck Sylvia as being the pleasantest room in the Chalet des Muguets, and that although, like the dining-room and drawing-room, it was extraordinarily bare.

There was no chest of drawers, no dressing-table, no cupboard to be seen.  Madame Wachner’s clothes hung on pegs behind the door, and there was a large brass-bound trunk in a corner of the room.

But the broad, low bed looked very comfortable, and there was a bath-room next door.

Madame Wachner showed her guest the bath-room with great pride.

“This is the ‘English comfortable,’” she said, using the quaint phrase the French have invented to express the acme of domestic luxury.  “My ’usband will never allow me to take a ’ouse that has no bath-room.  ’E is very clean about ’imself”—­she spoke as if it was a fact to be proud of, and Sylvia could not help smiling.