Page:Belloc Lowndes--The chink in the armour.djvu/115

Rh wood, only separated from the Châlet des Muguets by a straggling hedge.

"Does the wood belong to you, too?" she asked.

Madame Wachner shook her head.

"Oh! no," she said, "that is for sale!"

"You must find it very lonely here at night," said Sylvia, musingly, "you do not seem to have any neighbours either to the right or left."

"There is a villa a little way down the road," said Madame Wachner quickly. "But we are not nervous people—and then we 'ave nothing it would be worth anybody's while to steal."

Sylvia reminded herself that the Wachners must surely have a good deal of money in the house if they gambled as much as Anna Wolsky said they did. Her hostess could not keep it all in the little bag which she always carried hung on her wrist.

And then, as if Madame Wachner had seen straight into her mind, the old woman said significantly. "As to our money, I will show you where we keep it. Come into my bed-room; perhaps you will take off your hat there; then we shall be what English people call 'cosy.'"

Madame Wachner led the way again into the short passage, and so into a large bed-room, which looked, like the kitchen, on to the back garden.

After the kitchen, this bed-room struck Sylvia as being the pleasantest room in the Châlet des Muguets, and that although, like the dining-room and drawing-room, it was extraordinarily bare.

There was no chest of drawers, no dressing-table, no cupboard to be seen. Madame Wachner's clothes hung