“I’ll take you inside,” Raoul offered.
They walked across the small common silently, so deeply did they feel they were trespassing on some enchantment. From the cottage chimney curled a film of smoke that gave a voiceless voice to the silence, and when as they paused in the lych-gate, Castéra-Verduzan clanged the bell, it seemed indeed the summons to waken from a spell sleepers long ago bewitched.
“Surely nobody is going to answer that bell,” said Stella.
“Why, yes, of course, Ursule will open it. Ursule! Ursule!” he cried. “C’est moi, Monsieur Raoul.”
The cottage door opened and, evidently much delighted, Ursule came stumping down the path. She was an old woman whose rosy face was pectinated with fine wrinkles as delicate as the pluming of a moth’s wing, while everything about her dress gave the same impression of extreme fineness, though the stuff was only a black bombazine and the tippet round her shoulders was of coarse lace. When she and Raoul had talked together in rapidest French, Ursule like an old queen waved them graciously within.
They sat in the white parlor on tall chairs of black oak among the sounds of ticking clocks and distant bees and a smell of sweet herbs and dryness.
“And there’s a piano!” cried Stella, running to it. She played the Cat’s Fugue of Domenico Scarlatti.
“You could practice on that piano?” Raoul anxiously inquired. “It belonged to my sister who often came here. More than any of us do. She’s married now.”
The sadness in Raoul’s voice had made Michael suppose he was going to say his sister was dead.
“Then this divine place belongs to you?” Stella asked.