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 "hunted deer pattern." The accommodations of La belle Nivernaise are not palatial.

In the second room to the right, at the top of the landing, a new locataire had just moved in. As Gustave, the waiter, told Hortense, "la dame au douze" was of a reticence of a silenceness not to be believed! But she had insisted upon knowing who her neighbors were—the "monsieur du quatorze" and "les petites sceurs du dix!"

"She had pulled at the communicating doors, acted very strangely, and given him a piece of fifty cents for carrying up her hand-bags—and they of a lightness!"

"Was the monsieur du quatorze in his room?" Hortense inquired.

But Gustave did not know—he thought not. A bang at the hall door brought them both to the curtain at the end of the passage. Ah, to be sure, the gentleman himself—a nice gentleman, but with habits extraordinary. For the little he used his room he might as well have no room at all. For days at a time he never showed up. A "commis traveller," of course. 265