"Yes. You see most of the people who live here are out during the day."
"Please where do I live?"
"This way," cried Don cheerily, conducting her up the tiled steps to the gallery. "Number twenty-three."
His good cheer was infectious, and Flamby found herself to be succumbing to a sort of pleasant excitement as she passed along by the rows of well-groomed doors, each of which bore a number and a neat name-plate. Some of the quaint leaded lattices were open, revealing vases of flowers upon the ledges within, and the tiny casement curtains afforded an index to the characters of the various occupants, which made quite fascinating study. There was Mrs. Lawrence Pooney whose curtains were wedgwood blue with a cream border; Miss Hook, whose curtains were plain dark green; Miss Aldrington Beech, whose curtains were lemon coloured with a Chinese pattern; and Mrs. Marion de Lisle, whose curtains were of the hue of the passion flower.
The door of Number 23 proved to be open, and Flamby, passing in, stood looking around her and trying to realise that this was the stage upon which the next act of her life story should be played. She found herself in a rather small rectangular room, lighted by one large casement window and a smaller latticed one, both of them overlooking the courtyard. The woodwork was oaken and the walls were distempered a discreet and restful shade of blue. There were a central electric fitting and another for a reading-lamp, a fireplace of the latest slow-combustion pattern and a door communicating with an inner chamber.
"Oh!" cried Flamby. "What a dear little place!"
Don, who had been watching her anxiously, saw that she was really delighted and he entered into the spirit of the thing immediately. "I think it is simply terrific," he said. "I have often envied the Aunt her abode and wished I were an eligible spinster or widow. You have not seen the inner sanctuary yet; it is delightfully like a state-room."
Flamby passed through the doorway into the bedroom, which indeed was not much larger than a steamer cabin and was fitted with all those space-saving devices which one finds at sea; a bureau that was really a wash-basin, and a hidden wardrobe.
"There is a communal kitchen," explained Don, "with up-to-date appointments, also a general laundry, and there are bathrooms on both floors. I don't mean perpendicular bathrooms, so I should perhaps have said on either floor. In that cunning little alcove in the sitting-room is a small gas-stove, so that you will have no occasion to visit the kitchen unless you are preparing a banquet. You enjoy the use of the telephone, which is in the reading-room over the main entrance—and what more could one desire?"
"It's just great," declared Flamby, "and I can never hope to thank you for being so good to me. But I am wondering how I am going to afford it."