The door—­faithless Marie-Jeanne!—­opened as readily as the outer gate.  We were entering.  I glimpsed in a dim vista a superb Gothic hall of magnificent architecture and most imposing proportions, arched and carved and stretching off with apparent endlessness into the gloom.  Holding up my light, I scanned the place with growing interest.  It had not been demolished, but neither had it been spared.  The furniture was gone, save for a few scattered chairs and a table; the walls were defaced with cartoons and scrawled inscriptions; the floor was stained, and littered with empty bottles and broken plates.  From the chimney-place—­a medieval-art jewel topped with carved and colored enamels—­pieces had been hacked away by some deliberately destructive hand.  I glanced at Miss Falconer, whose eyes had been following mine.

“They tore down the tapestries,” she said beneath her breath.  “They slashed the old portraits with their swords and broke the windows and took away the statues and candlesticks and plate.  They cut up the furniture and had it used for fire-wood; and the German captain and his officers had a feast here and drank to the fall of Paris and ordered their soldiers to burn the village to the ground.  Oh, I don’t like the place any more; too much has happened.  And—­and I don’t like Marie-Jeanne’s not being here, Mr. Bayne.  I feel as if there were something wrong about it.  I believe I am a little—­just a little afraid!”

“Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that, do you?” I countered promptly.  “Because I won’t.  Why, it’s your pluck that has kept me up all day.  Just the same, on general principles, I’ll take a look round if you’ll allow me.  Here’s a chair, and if you will rest a minute, I’ll guarantee to find out.”

The chair I mentioned was standing near the chimney, and as I spoke I walked over to it and started to spin it round.  It resisted me heavily; I bent over it, lifting my candle.  Then I uttered an exclamation, stood petrified, and stared.

In the chair, concealed from us until now by the high carved back of wood, was something which at first looked like a huddled mass of garments, but which on closer scrutiny resolved itself into a woman in a striped dress, an apron, and a pair of heavy shoes.  There was a cut on her cheek, a bruise on her forehead.  Locks of graying hair straggled from beneath her disarranged white cap, and she glared at me from a lean, sallow face with a pair of terrified eyes.

She must be dead, I thought.  No living woman could sit so still and stare so wildly.  The scene in the inn garage rushed back upon me, and I must say that my blood turned cold.  But she was alive, I saw now; she was certainly breathing.  And an instant later I realized why she stayed so immobile; she was bound hand and foot to the chair she sat in, and a colored handkerchief, her own doubtless, had been twisted across her mouth to form a gag.

“I think,” I head myself saying, “that we have been maligning Marie-Jeanne.”