“Good Lord!”
“I went up a stone staircase.”
“No carpet?”
“No. Mérat opened the door to me. I told her I had met Miss Innes in a slum; she followed me into the drawing-room, saying, ‘One of these days Mademoiselle will bring back some horrid things with her.’”
“Good Lord! Tell me what her rooms were like?”
“The flat is better than you would expect to find in such a building. It is the staircase that makes the place look like a model dwelling-house. There is a drawing-room and a dining-room.”
“What kind of furniture has she in the drawing-room?”
“An oak settle in the middle of the room and—”
“That doesn’t sound very luxurious.”
“But there are photographs of pictures on the walls, Italian saints, the Renaissance, you know, Botticelli and Luini; her writing-table is near the window, a
