“Does M. Bernet lodge with you?” my master asked of the landlord.  We were his only patrons at the moment.

“M.  Bernet?  Him with the eye out?”

“The same.”

“Why, no, monsieur.  I don’t let lodgings.  The building is not mine.  I but rent the ground floor for my purposes.”

“But M. Bernet lodges in the house, then?”

“No, he doesn’t.  He lodges round the corner, in the court off the Rue Clichet.”

“But he comes here often?”

“Oh, aye.  Every morning for his glass.  And most evenings, too.”

M. Etienne laid down the drink-money, and something more.

“Sometimes he has a friend with him, eh?”

The man laughed.

“No, monsieur; he comes in here alone.  Many’s the time I’ll standing in my door when he’ll go by with some gallant, and he never chances to see me or my shop.  While if he’s alone it’s ’Good morning, Jean.  Anything in the casks to-day?’ He can no more get by my door than he’ll get by Death’s when the time comes.”

“No,” agreed M. Etienne; “we all stop there, soon or late.  Those friends of M. Bernet, then—­there is none you could put a name to?”

“Why, no, monsieur, more’s the pity.  He has none lives in this quarter.  M. Bernet’s in low water, you understand, monsieur.  If he lives here, it is because he can’t help it.  But he goes elsewhere for his friends.”

“Then you can tell us, my man, where he lodges?”

“Aye, that can I,” mine host answered, bustling out from behind the bar, eager in the interest of the pleasant-spoken, open-handed gallant.  “Just round the corner of the Rue Clichet, in the court.  The first house on the left, that is his.  I would go with monsieur, only I cannot leave the shop alone, and the wife not back from market.  But monsieur cannot miss it.  The first house in the court.  Thank you, monsieur.  Au revoir, monsieur.”

In the doorway of the first house on the left in the little court stood an old man with a wooden leg, sweeping heaps of refuse out of the passage.

“It appears that every one on this stair lacks something,” M. Etienne murmured to me.  “It is the livery of the house.  Can you tell me, friend, where I may find M. Bernet?”

The concierge regarded us without cordiality, while by no means ceasing his endeavours to cover our shoes with his sweepings.

“Third story back,” he said.

“Does M. Bernet lodge alone?”

“One of him’s enough,” the old fellow growled, whacking out his dirty broom on the door-post, powdering us with dust.  M. Etienne, coughing, pursued his inquiries: 

“Ah, I understood he shared his lodgings with a comrade.  He has a friend, then, in the building?”

“Aye, I suppose so,” the old chap grinned, “when monsieur walks in.”

“But he has another friend besides me, has he not?” M. Etienne persisted.  “One who, if he does not live here, comes often to see M. Bernet?”