Madame Wachner now came in.  She had taken off her bonnet and changed her elastic-sided boots for easy slippers.

“Oh, those French people!” she exclaimed.  “How greedy they are for money!  But—­well, Annette has earned her present very fairly—­” She shrugged her shoulders.

“May I go and take off my hat?” asked Sylvia; she left the room before Madame Wachner could answer her, and hurried down the short, dark passage.

The door of the moonlit kitchen was ajar, and to her surprise she saw that a large trunk, corded and even labelled, stood in the middle of the floor.  Close to the trunk was a large piece of sacking—­and by it another coil of thick rope.

Was it possible that the Wachners, too, were leaving Lacville?  If so, how very odd of them not to have told her!

As she opened the door of the bed-room Madame Wachner waddled up behind her.

“Wait a moment!” she cried.  “Or perhaps, dear friend, you do not want a light?  You see, we have been rather upset to-day, for L’Ami Fritz has to go away for two or three days, and that is a great affair!  We are so very seldom separated.  ‘Darby and Joan,’ is not that what English people would call us?”

“The moon is so bright I can see quite well,” Sylvia was taking off her hat; she put it, together with a little fancy bag in which she kept the loose gold she played with at the gambling tables, on Madame Wachner’s bed.  She felt vaguely uncomfortable, for even as Madame Wachner had spoken she had become aware that the bed-room was almost entirely cleared of everything belonging to its occupants.  However, the Wachners, like Anna Wolsky, had the right to go away without telling anyone of their intention.

As they came back into the dining-room together, Mrs. Bailey’s host, who was already sitting down at table, looked up.

“Words!  Words!  Words!” he exclaimed harshly.  “Instead of talking so much why do you not both come here and eat your suppers?  I am very hungry.”

Sylvia had never heard the odd, silent man speak in such a tone before, but his wife answered quite good-humouredly,

“You forget, Fritz, that the cabman is coming.  Till he has come and gone we shall not have peace.”

And sure enough, within a moment of her saying those words there came a sound of shuffling footsteps on the garden path.

Monsieur Wachner got up and went out of the room.  He opened the front door, and Sylvia overheard a few words of the colloquy between her host and his messenger.

“Yes, you are to take it now, at once.  Just leave it at the Villa du Lac.  You will come for us—­you will come, that is, for me”—­Monsieur Wachner raised his voice—­“to-morrow morning at half-past six.  I desire to catch the 7.10 train to Paris.”

There was a jingle of silver, and then Sylvia caught the man’s answering, “Merci, c’est entendu, M’sieur.”

But L’Ami Fritz did not come back at once to the dining-room.  He went out into the garden and accompanied the man down to the gate.