Rufin laughed and opened the note.  While he read it the boy watched him with the admiration which, in Paris, even the rat-like gamin of the streets pays to distinction such as his.  He was a tall man splendidly blonde, and he affected the cloak, the slouch hat, the picturesque amplitude of hair which were once the uniform of the artist.  But these, in his final effect, were subordinate to ’a certain breadth and majesty of brow, a cast of countenance at once benign and austere, as though the art he practiced so supremely both exacted much and conferred much.  He made a fine and potent figure as he stood, with his back to the bright street and the gutter-child standing beside him like a familiar companion, and read the smudged scrawl of Papa Musard.

“So Musard is very ill again, is he?” he asked of the boy.  “Have you seen him yourself?”

“Oh yes,” replied the boy; “I have seen him.  He lies in bed and his temper is frightful.”

“He is a very old man, you 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.