But Sir John's eyes were still riveted upon the poster, and his heart was beating with unaccustomed force. For just as though a vague likeness is sometimes borne swiftly in upon one, so a vague dissimilarity between the face on the poster and the heroine of his thoughts had slowly crept into his consciousness. He drew a little breath and stepped back. After all, he had the means of setting this tormenting doubt at rest. She had mentioned the address where she and her sister had lived. He would go there. He would see this sister. He would know the truth then once and for all. He walked hastily to the side of the broad pavement and summoned a _fiacre_. _Chapter IV_ THE TEMPERAMENT OF AN ARTIST "You may sit there and smoke, and look out upon your wonderful Paris," Anna said lightly. "You may talk--if you can talk cheerfully, not unless." "And you?" asked David Courtlaw. "Well, if I find your conversation interesting I shall listen. If not, I have plenty to think about," she answered, leaning back in her chair, and watching the smoke from her own cigarette curl upwards. "For instance?" She smiled. "How I am to earn enough _sous_ for my dinner to-morrow--or failing that, what I can sell." His face darkened. "And yet," he said, "you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all." "Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow." He turned upon her almost fiercely. "You know," he muttered, "you know quite well that your troubles are far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am utterly selfish?" She raised her eyebrows. "Troubles, my friend," she exclaimed lightly. "But I have no troubles." He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly. "What a gloomy person you are!" she murmured. "You call yourself an artist--but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little _abandon_, so little real joyousness." "And yet," he murmured, "one of the greatest of our writers has declared that the true spirit of Bohemianism is denied to your sex." "He was probably right," she declared. "Bohemianism is the least understood word ever coined. I do not think that I have the Bohemian spirit at all."