d a
blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the
air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The
ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in
which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace
drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick
brown paper pasted over the windows during the hot months still stuck to
the glass. The furniture was heavy, not old but middle-aged, lacking the
charm of antiquity, and in the worst French taste. The pictures were
banal; and there was no garden. More painful than all, the house was in
the Condamine; and Dodo, when she had spent a few days at "Monte" on her
way to England from Australia, had been told that "nobody who was
anybody lived down in the Condamine: only the 'cheap people' went
there." And Dodo did not consider herself a cheap person. She was paying
high to be the guest of a "lady of title": she wanted her money's worth,
and soon began to fear that there was doubt of getting it.

Servants had been engaged in advance for Lady Dauntrey by the agent who
had let the house. There were too few; and it needed but the first
night's dinner to prove that the cook was third rate, though Lady
Dauntrey carefully referred to him as the _chef_. In addition to this
person, occasionally seen flitting about in a dingy white cap, there was
a man to wait at table and open the door--a man, Dodo said, with the
face of a sulky codfish; and a hawk-nosed, hollow-cheeked woman to "do
the rooms" and act as maid to the ladies, none of the three having
brought a maid of her own. Their hostess had said she could not put up
her guests' servants, but they might "count upon a first-rate maid in
the house." They reminded each other of this promise, the day after
their arrival, and grumbled. Secundina had as much as she could do to
keep the rooms in order; and the only other service she was able to give
the visitors was to recount gruesome stories of the villa while she made
their beds or took a top layer of dust off their dressing-tables.
According to her, the Bella Vista was the cheapest furnished house to
let in the principality, because years ago a murder had been committed
in it. A woman had been killed for the sake of her jewels by the
tenants, a husband and wife. They had kept her body in a trunk for days,
and had attempted to get out of France with it, but had been arrested on
their way t