er the painted sign were white curtains at the windows. Dechartre
stopped before the small door and pushed Therese into the obscure alley.
She asked:

"Where are you leading me? What is the time? I must be home at half-past
seven. We are mad."

When they left the house, she said:

"Jacques, my darling, we are too happy; we are robbing life."

CHAPTER XXVI

IN DECHARTRE'S STUDIO

A fiacre brought her, the next day, to a populous street, half sad, half
gay, with walls of gardens in the intervals of new houses, and stopped at
the point where the sidewalk passes under the arcade of a mansion of the
Regency, covered now with dust and oblivion, and fantastically placed
across the street. Here and there green branches lent gayety to that city
corner. Therese, while ringing at the door, saw in the limited
perspective of the houses a pulley at a window and a gilt key, the sign
of a locksmith. Her eyes were full of this picture, which was new to her.
Pigeons flew above her head; she heard chickens cackle. A servant with a
military look opened the door. She found herself in a yard covered with
sand, shaded by a tree, where, at the left, was the janitor's box with
bird-cages at the windows. On that side rose, under a green trellis, the
mansard of the neighboring house. A sculptor's studio backed on it its
glass-covered roof, which showed plaster figures asleep in the dust. At
the right, the wall that closed the yard bore debris of monuments, broken
bases of columnettes. In the rear, the house, not very large, showed the
six windows of its facade, half hidden by vines and rosebushes.

Philippe Dechartre, infatuated with the architecture of the fifteenth
century in France, had reproduced there very cleverly the characteristics
of a private house of the time of Louis XII. That house, begun in the
middle of the Second Empire, had not been finished. The builder of so
many castles died without being able to finish his own house. It was
better thus. Conceived in a manner which had then its distinction and its
value, but which seems to-day banal and outlandish, having lost little by
little its large frame of gardens, cramped now between the walls of the
tall buildings, Philippe Dechartre's little house, by the roughness of
its stones, by the naive heaviness of its windows, by the simplicity of
the roof, which the architect's widow had caused to be covered with
little expense, by all the lucky accidents of the unfinished and
u