"Monsieur désire?"
"Mais c'est moi, Blanquette."
In another minute she had ushered me in, set down the lamp and was hugging me in her strong young arms.
"But my little Asticot, I did not know you. You have changed. You are no longer the same. Tu es tout à fait monsieur! How proud the Master will be."
"Where is he?"
Alas, the Master did not expect me to-day and was at the Café Delphine. She would go straightway and tell him. I must be tired and hungry. She would get me something to eat. But who would have thought I should have come back a monsieur! How I had grown! I must see the appartement. This was the salon.
I looked around me for the first time. Nothing in it save the rickettiness of a faded rep suite arranged primly around the walls, and a few bookshelves stuffed with tattered volumes suggested Paragot. The round centre table, covered with American cloth, and the polished floor were spotless. Cheap print curtains adorned the windows and a cage containing a canary hung between them. Three or four oleographs—one a portrait of Garibaldi—in gilt frames formed the artistic decoration.
"It was I who chose the pictures," said Blanquette proudly.
She opened a door and disclosed the sleeping chamber of the Master, very bare, but very clean. Another door led into the kitchen—a slip of a place but glistening like the machine room of a man-of-war.
"I have a bedroom upstairs, and there is one also for you which the Master has taken. Come and I will show you."