Luck continued to favour him; for the next morning, as he went down the stairs of his hotel, he met Donald Paul coming up. His visitor, fresh and handsome as his photograph, and dressed in exactly the right clothes for the hour and the occasion, held out an eager hand. “I’m so glad—I hoped I’d catch you,” he smiled up at the descending French; and then, as if to tone down what might seem an excess of warmth, or at least make it appear the mere overflow of his natural spirits, he added: “My wife rushed me off to say how sorry she is that she can’t take you to the studio this morning. She’d quite forgotten an appointment with her dressmaker—_one_ of her dressmakers!” Donald Paul stressed it with a frank laugh; his desire, evidently, was to forestall French’s surprise. “You see,” he explained, perhaps guessing that a sense of values was expected of him, “it’s rather more of a business for her than for—well, the average woman. These people—the big ones—are really artists themselves nowadays, aren’t they? And they all regard her as a sort of Inspiration; she really tries out the coming fashions for them—lots of things succeed or fail as they happen to look on _her_.” Here he seemed to think another laugh necessary. “She’s always been an Inspiration; it’s come to be a sort of obligation to her. You see, I’m sure?” French protested that he saw—and that any other day was as convenient— “Ah, but that’s the deuce of it! The fact is, we’re off for Biarritz the day after tomorrow; and St. Moritz later. We shan’t be back here, I suppose, till the early spring. And of course _you_ have your plans; ah, going back to America next week? Jove, that is bad.” He frowned over it with an artless boyish anxiety. “And tomorrow—well, you know what a woman’s last day in Paris is likely to be, when she’s had only three of them! Should you mind most awfully—think it hopelessly inadequate, I mean—if I offered to take you to the studio instead?” He reddened a little, evidently not so much at the intrusion of his own person into the setting of his predecessor’s life, as at his conscious inability to talk about Horace Fingall in any way that could possibly interest Willis French. “Of course,” he went on, “I shall be a wretched substitute ... I know so little ... so little in any sense.... I never met him,” he avowed, as if excusing an unaccountable negligence. “You know how savagely he kept to himself.... Poor Bessy—_she_ could tell you something about that!” But he pulled up sharp at this involuntary lapse into the personal, and let his smile of interrogation and readiness say the rest for him. “Go with you? But of course—I shall be delighted,” French responded; and a light of relief shone in Mr. Paul’s transparent eyes.