There,
once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire
lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet
showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece,
the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.
"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it
fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.
"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open
her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the
street below.
She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop
which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so
powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated
red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He
would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought
well of.
"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had
said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other
times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold
meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.
"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"
She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.
* * * * *
The days passed.
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