NOUVELLE HORREUR

STRANGER

Mrs. Mbappé passed through a little alley leading from one of the gates which are around Jean Rameau’s park, and came out on the wide and quiet street. She walked along slowly, watching anxiously from side to side so as not to overlook the number. She pulled her coat closer round her; after her years in India this New York damp seemed very hard.. Mrs. Mbappé's hair and eyelashes and her furs were powdered with tiny drops. But there was nothing in the weather she could see the faces of people some distance off and read the signs on the shops.

Before the door of a dealer in second-hand furniture she paused and looked through the uncleaned window.

"Yes this is the place."

She opened the door, which met her entrance from somewhere in the black depths of the shop the dealer came forward. He had a white face, with a black beard. Mrs. Mbappé spoke to him in a low voice.

A look of complicity and of irony, passed through the seller's sad eyes..

"Yes, she is here, madam. Whether she will see you or not I do not know. She is not always well she has her moods. And then, we have to be so careful. The police ,Not that they would touch a lady like you. But the poor alien has not much chance these days."

Mrs. Mbappé followed him to the back of the shop, where there was a staircase. She knocked over a few things in her passage and stooped to pick them up, but the dealer kept saying,

"It does not matter surely it does not matter."

"You must go up these stairs. They are very dark, be careful. When you come to a door, open it and go straight in."

He stood at the foot of the stairs holding the light high above his head and she ascended.

The room was not very large, and it seemed very ordinary. There were some uncomfortable chairs. Two large palms were in corners. Under a glass cover on the table was a view of Rome. The room had not a look of buisness, thought Mrs.Mbappé there was no suggestion of the office or waiting-room where people came and went all day; yet you would not say that it was a private room which was lived in. There were no books or papers about; every chair was in the place it had been placed there was no fire and it was very cold.

To the right of the window was a door covered with a plush curtain. Mrs. Mbappé sat down near the table and watched this door. She laid her hands one on top of the other on the table. She had forgotten that frightening man in Paris who said he had been a priest. Yet of them all it was only he who had told her anything definite. But even he could do no more than tell the past. He told of her marriage. He told too of their time in India at least, he knew that her husband had been a soldier, and said he had been on service in the colonies. On the whole, though, he had been as unsatisfactory as the others. She did not want to be told of the past. If Matt was gone forever, then with him had gone all her love of living, her courage, all her better self. She wanted to be lifted out of the despair, longing at night for the morning, and in the morning for the fall of night, which had been her life since his death. If somebody could assure her that it was not all over, that he was somewhere, not too far away, unchanged from what he had been here, with his crisp hair and r smile and brown face, that he saw her sometimes, that he had not forgotten her.

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