enter the great, white, lately
completed court-house. Then both she and her satellite had vanished.

He turned again, but not to enter the building. His watch read but
half past eight, and his first errand of the day, unless seeing her had
been his first, was to go one square farther on, for a look at the
wreckers tearing down the old Hotel St. Louis. As he turned, a man
neat of dress and well beyond middle age made him a suave gesture.

"Sir, if you please. You are, I think, Mr. Chester, notary public and
attorney at law?"

"That is my name and trade, sir." Evidently Mr. Geoffry Chester was
also an American, a Southerner.

"Pardon," said his detainer, "I have only my business card." He
tendered it: "Marcel Castanado, Masques et Costumes, No. 312, rue
Royale, entre Bienville et Conti."

"I diz-ire your advice," he continued, "on a very small matter neither
notarial, neither of the law. Yet I must pay you for that, if you can
make your charge as--as small as the matter."

The young lawyer's own matters were at a juncture where a fee was a
godsend, yet he replied:

"If your matter is not of the law I can make you no charge."

The costumer shrugged: "Pardon, in that case I must seek elsewhere."
He would have moved on, but Chester asked:

"What kind of advice do you want if not legal?"

"Literary."

The young man smiled: "Why, I'm not literary."

"I think yes. You know Ovide Landry? Black man? Secon'-han' books,
Chartres Street, just yonder?"

"Yes, very pleasantly, for I love old books."

"Yes, and old buildings, and their histories. I know. You are now
going down, as I have just been, to see again the construction of that
old dome they are dim-olishing yonder, of the once state-house,
previously Hotel St. Louis. I know. Twice a day you pass my shop. I
am compelled to see, what Ovide also has told me, that, like me and my
wife, you have a passion for the _poetique_ and the _pittoresque_!"

"Yes," Chester laughed, "but that's my limit. I've never written a
line for print----"

"This writing is done, since fifty years."

"I've never passed literary judgment on a written page and don't
suppose I ever shall."

"The judgment is passed. The value of the article is pronounced
great--by an expert amateur."

"SHE?" the youth silently asked himself. He spoke: "Why, then what
advice do you still want--how to find a publisher?"

"No, any publisher will jump at that. But how to so nig-otiat