In the evening, at about seven-thirty, I told Rémy Couillard to have dinner served. He said: "... Monsieur is not ready.... He is upstairs with the gentleman who brought a large photograph of the President. (Couillard had himself opened the parcel for his master.) The gentleman called this afternoon, and he is still in the studio."
"When did he come?"
"At tea-time, Madame."
I went up to the dressmaker, who was still at work.
"Oh! Monsieur Steinheil was looking for you a little time ago, to show you the portrait of M. Fallières. I saw it—it is very nice...."
It was clear that my husband had come down to find where I was, so that he might let the "foreigner" out of the house without my seeing him.
I was about to go up the stairs leading to the studio when I heard steps coming down in the dark. I was at the door of the sewing-room in the corridor on the first floor. To my intense surprise I saw a man lift the tapestry shutting off the corridor from the landing. The man walked straight on, my husband following him. When he saw me, the man exclaimed in French, but with a pronounced German accent: "Oh! excuse me, Mademoiselle."
"No, no," said my husband, "that is not my daughter, but my wife."
"You are not on the ground floor, Sir," I said coldly, "but on the first floor where the private apartments are."
(It had struck me that he seemed to know his way to the corridor, and perhaps to the boudoir where the documents were kept. The tapestry hid the entrance to the passage so well that it could not possibly occur to any one not familiar with the topography of the house to raise the heavy drapery—in the thought that it led to the hall—for it looked for all the world as if it were hung against the wall of the landing.)