examined them, and directed us to call at the Maine for them next
morning at eight o'clock. Now, indeed, we were walking a tight rope.
Following the genius who had got us our suppers, we emerged into the
dark street, walked down it a few doors, entered a courtyard full of
cavalry horses, where men in spurred boots were clanking up and down
stairs. He thrust a heavy key into a lock, opened a door and ushered us
into an empty and elegantly furnished house.

Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with
satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of
them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as
its owner had left it. Who he might be, why we should be here, how our
mysterious, conductor--who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but
landed there himself that night--had arranged this occupation, was
beyond finding out. At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling
past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about
in the room overhead--an extension of the adjoining house--one scarcely
thought of trying to find out. One merely accepted it, enchained by
that uplifted finger and "Leave it to me!" For a time we talked under
the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on street
and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama,
and then we slept.

The Germans were evidently much nearer than Paris had supposed, and we
should not have been greatly surprised to find them in the streets next
morning. It was an Algerian horseman, however, muffled up in his dingy
white and looking rather chilly, who was riding past the window as I
first looked out.

We went to the Mairie--not the grandfatherly old mayor this time, but a