Bowen understood.  “Yes, if I had a dollar, M’sieu, for every time I sat on one of those chairs inside the sidewalk—­in under the trees, you know, M’sieu—­and watched the autos go by!  Talk about autos!—­there’s the place for autos, coming down from that big Napoleon Arch.  Some arch, that, isn’t it?  Yes, sir—­down from there to the Place de la Concorde and back again, around the Arch and on to the Bois.  And there’s a sight for a man, too!  To sit out on the Bois sidewalk, M’sieu, your chair almost under the bushes, and watch those cabs and autos in the late afternoon, coming on dark.  Count them?  No more than you could count fire-flies of an evening in the West Indies—­like one string of light.”

“Mon Dieu!  Come to the inner room, if you please, sir, and tell me more.  What a good angel which has sent you here!  Twenty-five years since I have seen my Paris.  And the Tuileries, my friend, is it yet the same?”

“Just the same, M’sieu, a million bare-legged children with short white socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps running wild after them.  And the Eiffel Tower!  But that’s since your time, M’sieu Perrault?”

“Ah—­h, but have I not heard?  Continue, continue, if you please, sir.  You bring a strange joy to my heart.  The Louvre, for example—­you have been there, yes?”

“Been there?  Yes, and ’most googoo-eyed from looking at the pictures there—­miles of ’em, aren’t there?”

“Oh-h! and Mona Lisa—­yes!”

“That dark one with the queer kind of a smile?  She must have had green eyes, that one—­green eyes with lights in them.  And she kept them all guessing, I’ll bet a hat, when she was alive—­” and Bowen ran on till every blessed breakwater man silently stole away.  Bowen and old Perrault had a three o’clock session that first night; and within the year he had married Claire.

II

Having completed his work on the wireless plant at the Navy Yard, Bowen thought himself due for a lay-off.  And he did want to be home for a while, but orders came to have installed before the end of the year an experimental plant on Light-ship 67, which guarded Tide Rip Shoal to the eastward.

Bowen, with his two helpers and his apparatus, took passage with Baldwin on the wheezy little Whist to where, twenty miles east by south from the end of the breakwater, lay the tossing light-ship.

Baldwin was well acquainted with old 67.  Every once in a while the commandant would order Baldwin to make this trip for the accommodation of somebody or other in the yard.  “But a wonder,” he observed now, as he had observed a score of times before on nearing her—­“a wonder they wouldn’t put one of those new class o’ steam lightships out here.  If I was you, Bowen, I’d have an eye to the life-boat you see hanging to her stern there.”

“Why?”

“Well, if the old hooker went adrift, you might need it.”