It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse cages—white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner—boxes and boxes of things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it away"—boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of dried modelling clay….
"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had "P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright treasure in his mind—his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of difficult questions.
Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished chair-back in her hand.
"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at. Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his mother's initials on it in gold.
* * * * *
Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the "Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien's voice would call to her.
"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down at her from her high seat behind the mugs and glasses.
"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn't written," and even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.