He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round tables on the sidewalk outside a corner cafe. Only one of them was in use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other customer. A dirty waiter appeared from the cafe and shuffled forward, adjusting his apron. "_B'jour, monsieur_," the waiter mumbled. Stainton did not return this salutation. "_Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau_," he ordered. He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago. He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning. The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink, put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew. The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles; the girls annoyed him most because they would call one another's attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their own hearts; but Jim hated them all. He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage, went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but, when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he found himself the first patient in the waiting-room. Was _M. le medecin_ in? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he doubted if _M. le medecin_ could as yet receive monsieur. It was early, and _M. le medecin_ rarely saw any patients before--