ou see," said Rufin. "Old men have much to
suffer. Well, tell him I will come this afternoon to visit him. And
this"--producing a coin from his pocket--"this is for you."

The gamin managed, in some fashion of his own, to combine, in a
single movement, a snatch at the money with a gesture of polite
deprecation. They parted with mutual salutations, two gentlemen who
had carried an honorable transaction to a worthy close. A white-
aproned waiter smiled upon them tolerantly and held open the door
that Rufin might enter to his lunch.

It was in this manner that the strings were pulled which sent Rufin
on foot to Montmartre, with the sun at his back and the streets
chirping about him. Two young men, passing near the Opera, saluted
him with the title of "maitre;" and then the Paris of sleek
magnificence lay behind him and the street sloped uphill to the Place
Pigalle and all that region where sober, industrious Parisians work
like beavers to furnish vice for inquiring foreigners. Yet steeper
slopes ascended between high houses toward his destination, and he
came at last to the cobbled courtyard, overlooked by window-dotted
cliffs of building, above which Papa Musard had his habitation.

A fat concierge, whose bulged and gaping clothes gave her the aspect
of an over-ripe fruit, slept stonily in a chair at the doorway. Rufin
was not certain whether Musard lived on the fourth floor or the
fifth, and would have been glad to inquire, but he had not the
courage to prod that slumbering bulk, and was careful to edge past
without touching it. The grimy stair led him upward to find out for
himself.

On the third floor, according to his count, a door looked like what
he remembered of Musard's, but it yielded no answer to his knocking.
A flight higher there was another which stood an inch or so ajar, and
this he ventured to push open that he might look in. It yielded him a
room empty of life, but he remained in the doorway looking.

It was a commonplace, square, ugly room, the counterpart of a hundred
others in that melancholy building; but its window, framing a saw-
edged horizon of roofs and chimneys, faced to the north, and some
one, it was plain, had promoted it to the uses of a studio. An easel
stood in the middle of the floor with a canvas upon it; the walls
were covered with gross caricatures drawn upon the bare plaster with
charcoal. A mattress and some tumbled bedclothes lay in one corner,
and a few humble utensils also te