His friends would only come and fetch him away; whereas she, motherly soul! was prepared to take him in and do for him.

The pocket of the coat which on the day of his arrival she had carried off to her kitchen to dry contained satisfactory proof that Monsieur was a young gentleman who could pay; and although she was too honest to recoup herself for her services in advance, she had kept the coat hanging up in her room for a week, as a pleasant reminder of the joys of hospitality.
Only yesterday the invalid had recovered sufficiently to rout the doctor and stagger down to the telegraph-office; and to-day, propped up with pillows on the uncomfortable stuff-sofa, he was expiating his rashness with a day of miserable coughing.
At the sound of his handbell, the landlady, a buxom dame of forty-five autumns, hastened to the couch of her profitable visitor.
Roger was too weak to oppose the flood of her congratulations and compliments on his recovery, and allowed her to talk herself breathless before he put in his word.
"Madame has not been many years in these parts ?" he inquired in his best French.
Madame threw up her shoulders and protested she had lived in those parts from a child, when the dull suburb was once a festive little rustic village, and the great city now gobbling it up once loomed mysteriously in the north, with acres and miles of green fields and woods between.
"But this hotel," said Roger, "has not stood here so long ?" "_Ma foi_!" said she, "since I can remember, when I used to visit my good uncle here every Sunday, I remember `L'Hotel Soult.' Why, when I married my cousin and became _Madame l'hotesse_, it was all fields between us and Paris.

Yes, and little enough change about the house.
We cannot afford, Monsieur, to build and decorate.

By a miracle we escaped the German shells.

Ah! a merry time was the year of the war! France suffered, alas! but the `L'Hotel Soult' prospered.