“Your house, Madame,” I suggested craftily, with a view to reconnoissance, “is, of course, full?”

She heaved a sigh.

“It is war-time, Monsieur,” she lamented.  “None travel now.  Yet why should I mourn, since I make enough to keep me till the war is ended and my man comes home?  There are those who eat here daily at the noon hour—­the cure, the mayor, the mayor’s secretary, sometimes the notary of the town, as well.  And to-night I have two guests, monsieur and the young lady—­the nurse who goes to the hospital at Carrefonds with the great new remedy for burns and scars. Au revoir, Monsieur.  In one little moment I will send the hot water, and in half an hour monsieur shall dine.”

I closed the door behind her and flung down my bag, fuming.  So Miss Falconer was a nurse, carrying a panacea to the wounded, doubtless a specimen of the sensational new remedy just recognized by the medical authorities, of which the one newspaper I had glanced through in Paris had been full.  The masquerade was too preposterous to gain an instant’s credence.  It gave me, as the French say, furiously to think; it resolved all doubts.

I felt inexplicably angry, then preternaturally cool and competent.  For the first time since the Modane episode I was my clear-sighted self.  I had been trying futilely to blindfold my eyes, to explain the inexplicable, to be unaware of the obvious.  Now with a sort of grim relief I looked the facts in the face.

My hot water appearing, I made a sketchy toilet, and then descended to the courtyard where I lounged and smoked.  My state of mind was peculiar.  As I struck a match I noticed with a queer pride that my hand was steady.  With a cold, almost sardonic clarity, I thought of Miss Falconer.  First a prosperous tourist, next a dweller in an aristocratic French mansion, then a nurse.  She equaled, I told myself, certain heroines of our Sunday supplements, queens of the smugglers, moving spirits of the diamond ring.

Upstairs in the right-hand gallery a door opened.  A light footstep sounded on the winding stairs.  The critical moment was upon me; she was coming.  I threw away my cigarette and advanced.

She was playing her part, I saw, with due regard for detail.  Now that her furs were off she stood forth in the white costume, the flowing head-dress, the red cross—­all the panoply of the infirmiere.  She came half-way down the stairs before perceiving me; then, with a low exclamation, grasping the balustrade, she stood still.

I didn’t even pretend surprise.  What was the use of it?

“Good-evening, Miss Falconer,” was all I said.

It seemed a long time before she answered.  Rigid, uncompromising, she faced me; and I read storm signals in the deep flush of her cheeks, the gray flash of her eyes, the stiffness of her white-draped head.

“Oh, Lord!” I groaned to myself in cold compassion, “she means to bluff it!  Can’t she see that the game’s played out?”