The Vicomte de Montmédy, rich now, through his marriage with an American heiress, was a lover of the arts, a connoisseur and a buyer of pictures. Fontenelle had known him in the days when he was only a struggling and unsuccessful painter. His title and his noble birth, had stood him in better stead than his talent. That this was of an inferior quality to his fine taste in art, François had early recognized, and his felicitations on the subject of his prudent marriage had therefore gained an added warmth and fervour of approval. The two men had been talking while the daylight waned, and when François, finding his match-box empty, rose to refill it from a jar on a side table, he paused to glance with a shiver upon the prospect outside the window. The studio looked upon the Luxembourg Gardens. The trees were bare now, and their branches showed black and stiff against a wintry sky. The paths underneath them, in summer gay as the flower beds, with children and their nurses, were now lightly powdered with the first fall of snow. “I ought to have gone abroad,” he declared, lighting a cigarette. “If it were not for these confounded commissions, I should be in Rome at this moment. There’s no light here. It’s abominable!” “Why Rome?” asked the Vicomte lazily. “I love Rome. And then sweet Anne Page is there, and she’s always an attraction.” The other man looked up quickly. “By the way, it’s _her_ portrait the Luxembourg has bought, isn’t it?” “Yes.” He made a quick movement. “Good heavens man, it’s here, and I’ve never shown it to you. I forgot you hadn’t seen it. It goes next week. I kept it to do a little work on the background first.” “Quick! Show me before the light goes,” urged his friend. “I was always curious about it.” François crossed the studio rapidly, and returned with a large canvas. “The best thing I ever did in my life,” he said deliberately, as he placed it on an easel in the middle of the room. The Vicomte had risen, and in a silence that lasted for some time the men stood before the picture. “Charming!” he murmured at last. “Adorable! They’ve picked out the right thing, _mon ami, hein_? The smile! How well one remembers it. So sweet, and so shy. And that flowered gown. Admirable! It suggests one of the Botticelli Madonnas. It might be a robe all sown with stars. And the hair, that delicious soft hair that was no particular colour--_couleur de miel_, perhaps.” “Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small, like a woman,” quoted François softly. “What’s that?” “It’s Shakespeare. And it’s Anne Page,” he answered smiling. “And the flowers! The great sheaf of flowers she’s carrying. They’re English, and ‘sweet-Anne’ too.” Fontenelle looked amused. “You always pronounced it like that,--as one word!” he said. “I used to think it _was_ one word. Just a Christian name; a lovely name.” He joined in his friend’s laugh. “When did you do this?” he asked after a moment. “Just before she went.” “Was I away then?”