shall be obliged to rest sooner than I fancied. I
wish first I could have finished my work. I must not leave it
unfinished."

One morning when he had been obliged to give up painting, through a
sudden fit of prostration, on following her to the door, he took her
hand and held it a moment.

"I was awake all last night," he said. "Yesterday I saw a poor fellow
who had fallen ill on the street, carried into the Hotel Dieu, and the
memory clung to me. I began to imagine how it would be if such a thing
happened to me--what I should say when they asked for my friends,--how
there would be none to send for. And at last, suddenly I thought of
you. I said to myself, 'I would send for her, and I think she would
come.'"

"Yes, Monsieur," she answered. "You might depend upon my coming."

"I am used to being alone," he went on; "but it seemed to me as I lay
in the dark thinking it over, that to die alone would be a different
matter. One would want some familiar face to look at--"

"Monsieur!" she burst forth. "You speak as if Death were always near
you!"

"Do I?" he said. And he was silent for a few seconds, and looked down
at her hand as he held it. Then he dropped it gently with a little
sigh. "Good-bye," he said, and so they parted.

In the afternoon she sat to Masson.

"How much longer," he said to her in the course of the sitting,--"how
much longer does he mean to live--this American? He has lasted
astonishingly. They are wonderful fellows, these weaklings who burn
themselves out. One might fancy that the flame which finally destroys
them, also kept them alive."

"Do you then think that he is so very ill?" she asked in a low voice.

"He will go out," he answered, "like a candle. Shall I tell you a
secret?"

She made a gesture of assent.

"He starves! The _concierge_ who has watched him says he does not buy
food enough to keep body and soul together. But how is one to offer
him anything? It is easy to see that he would not take it."

There was a moment of silence, in which he went on painting.

"The trouble is," he said at last, "that a man would not know how to
approach him. It is only women who can do these things."

Until the sitting was over neither the one nor the other spoke again.
When it was over and Natalie was on the point of leaving the room,
Masson looked at her critically.

"You are pale," he remarked. "You are like a ghost."

"Is it not becoming?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Then why complain?"