rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them
graciously within.

They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the
sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs and
dryness.

"And there's a piano!" cried Stella, running to it. She played the Cat's
Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.

"You could practice on that piano?" Raoul anxiously inquired. "It
belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do. She's
married now."

The sadness in Raoul's voice had made Michael suppose he was going to
say his sister was dead.

"Then this divine place belongs to you?" Stella asked.

"To my sister and me. Ursule was once my nurse. Would you be my guests
here, although I shall be away? For as long as you like. Ursule will
look after you. Do say 'yes.'"

"Why, what else could we say?" Michael and Stella demanded
simultaneously.

It was a disappointment to the Regniers when Michael and Stella came
back to announce their retreat into the fast woodland, but perhaps M.
Regnier found compensation in going down to his favorite cafe that
afternoon and speaking of his guests, Monsieur and Mademoiselle Fene,
now staying with M. le prince de Castera-Verduzan at his hunting-lodge
in the forest.

Later that afternoon with their luggage and music Raoul brought Michael
and Stella back to the cottage in his car, after which he said good-bye.
Ursule was happy to have somebody to look after, and the cottage that
had seemed so very small against the high beeches of the steep country
behind was much larger when it was explored. It stretched out a
rectangular wing of cool and shadowed rooms toward the forest. In this
portion Ursule lived, and there was the pantry, and the kitchen embossed
with copper pans, and the still-room which had garnered each flowery
year in its course. Coterminous with Ursule's wing was a flagged court
where a stone well-head stained with gray and orange lichen mirrored a
circumscribed world. Beyond into an ancient orchard whose last red
apples ripened under the first outstretched boughs of the forest tossed
an acre of garden with runner-beans still in bloom.

In the part of the cottage where Stella and Michael lived, besides the
white parlor with the piano, there was the hall with a great hooded
fireplace and long polished dining-table lined and botched by the homely
meals of numberless dead banqueters; and at either end of the cottage
there were two small bedroo