ere's
Vagot making his thousands of francs a week next door at the Moulin
Rouge, and this poor fat clown still where he was!"

Max did not reply. His head was bent, his face flushed; he was sketching
with a furious haste.

"What are you doing?"

Still no reply. The song rolled on; and Blake, leaning back in his seat,
smoking with leisurely enjoyment, felt for perhaps the first time in his
life the sense of complete companionship--that subtle condition of mind
so continuously craved, so rarely found, so instantly recognized.

"Boy," he said at last, "let me come up sometimes when you're messing
with your paints? I won't bother you."

Max looked up and nodded--a mere flash of a look, but one that conveyed
sufficient; and the two relapsed again into silence.

At the end of an hour the boy raised his head, tossed a lock of hair out
of his eyes, and closed his sketch-book.

Blake met his eyes comprehendingly. "Will we go?"

"Yes. But one more glance at this black-and-white!"

He jumped up, unembarrassed, unconscious of self, and looked at the
picture closely; then stepped back and looked at it from a little
distance, eyes half closed, head critically upon one side.

"Satisfied?" Blake rose more slowly.

"Perfectly. It is clever--this! It has imagination!" He slipped his arm
confidingly through Blake's, and together they made a way to the door.

A new song began as they stepped into the outer room--the tinkle of the
piano came thinly across the smoke-laden air. Blake paused and looked
back.

"Well, and what do you think of it? A trifle dull, perhaps, but still--"

"Dull? But no! Never! I could work here. Others have worked here. It is
in the atmosphere--- the desire to create."

They passed into the street, Blake raising his hat to a stout lady,
presumably Madame Fruvier, who sat wedged behind the counter, Max
glancing greedily at the bold rough sketches, the brilliantly Parisian
caricatures adorning the walls.

"It is in the atmosphere! One breathes it!" he said again, as they
walked down the cool, lighted boulevard. "I feel it to-night as I have
not felt it before--the artist's Paris. _Mon ami_"--he raised a glowing
face--"_mon ami_, tell me something! Do you think I shall succeed? Do
you think I possess a spark of the great fire--a spark ever so tiny?"

His earnestness was almost comical. He stopped and arraigned his
companion, regardless of interested glances and passing smiles.

"Ned, tell me! Tell