She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.
"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and susceptible."
"Indeed, I _am_ young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I came to Charleville...."
"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"
"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the window. Here is the street."
"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and how delighted. Is the house here?"
"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. _It is an empty house._"
"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"
He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "_Eh bien! More_ officers? I told you, _mon lieutenant_, we have not room for one more."
"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this time. Have you the key?"
"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."
The young _concierge,_ under the impression that he was certainly installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with a look of impish reproof in her eyes.
Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard, leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led up into the house.
The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues, arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.
"Who lived here?" echoed the _concierge_, and a strange look passed over her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans...."
"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."