“Look, do you see the taller of those two there?  That’s Sylvestre Lampron.”

“Prix du Salon two years ago?”

“A great gun, you know.”

“He looks it.”

“To the left,” said Lampron.

We turned to the left, and found ourselves in the Rue Hautefeuille, before a shabby house, within the porch of which hung notices of apartments to let; this was the framemaker’s.  The passage was dark, the walls were chipped by the innumerable removals of furniture they had witnessed.  We went upstairs.  On the fourth floor a smell of glue and sour paste on the landing announced the tenant’s profession.  To make quite certain there was a card nailed to the door with “Plumet, Frame-Maker.”

“Plumet?  A newly-married couple?”

But already Madame Plumet is at the door.  It is the same little woman who came to Boule’s office.  She recognizes me in the dim light of the staircase.

“What, Monsieur Lampron, do you know Monsieur Mouillard?”

“As you apparently do, too, Madame Plumet.”

“Oh, yes!  I know him well; he won my action, you know.”

“Ah, to be sure-against the cabinet-maker.  Is your husband in?”

“Yes, sir, in the workshop.  Plumet!”

Through the half-opened door giving access to an inner room w e could see-in the midst of his molders, gilders, burnishers, and framers—­a little dark man with a beard, who looked up and hurriedly undid the strings of his working-apron.

“Coming, Marie!”

Little Madame Plumet was a trifle upset at having to receive us in undress, before she had tidied up her rooms.  I could see it by her blushes and by the instinctive movement she made to smooth her disordered curls.

The husband had hardly answered her call before she left us and went off to the end of the room, into the obscure recesses of an alcove overcrowded with furniture.  There she bent over an oblong object, which I could not quite see at first, and rocked it with her hand.

“Monsieur Mouillard,” said she, looking up to me—­“Monsieur Mouillard, this is my son, Pierre!”

What tender pride in those words, and the smile which accompanied them!  With a finger she drew one of the curtains aside.  Under the blue muslin, between the pillow and the white coverlet, I discovered two little black eyes and a tuft of golden hair.

“Isn’t he a little rogue!” she went on, and began to caress the waking baby.

Meanwhile Sylvestre had been talking to Plumet at the other end of the room.

“Out of the question,” said the frame-maker; “we are up to our knees in arrears; twenty orders waiting.”

“I ask you to oblige me as a friend.”

“I wish I could oblige you, Monsieur Lampron; but if I made you a promise, I should not be able to keep it.”

“What a pity!  All was so well arranged, too.  The sketch was to have been hung with my two engravings.  Poor Fabien!  I was saving up a surprise for you.  Come and look here.”