One morning when he had been obliged to give up painting, through a sudden fit of prostration, on following her to the door, he took her hand and held it a moment. "I was awake all last night," he said. "Yesterday I saw a poor fellow who had fallen ill on the street, carried into the Hotel Dieu, and the memory clung to me. I began to imagine how it would be if such a thing happened to me--what I should say when they asked for my friends,--how there would be none to send for. And at last, suddenly I thought of you. I said to myself, 'I would send for her, and I think she would come.'" "Yes, Monsieur," she answered. "You might depend upon my coming." "I am used to being alone," he went on; "but it seemed to me as I lay in the dark thinking it over, that to die alone would be a different matter. One would want some familiar face to look at--" "Monsieur!" she burst forth. "You speak as if Death were always near you!" "Do I?" he said. And he was silent for a few seconds, and looked down at her hand as he held it. Then he dropped it gently with a little sigh. "Good-bye," he said, and so they parted. In the afternoon she sat to Masson. "How much longer," he said to her in the course of the sitting,--"how much longer does he mean to live--this American? He has lasted astonishingly. They are wonderful fellows, these weaklings who burn themselves out. One might fancy that the flame which finally destroys them, also kept them alive." "Do you then think that he is so very ill?" she asked in a low voice. "He will go out," he answered, "like a candle. Shall I tell you a secret?" She made a gesture of assent. "He starves! The _concierge_ who has watched him says he does not buy food enough to keep body and soul together. But how is one to offer him anything? It is easy to see that he would not take it." There was a moment of silence, in which he went on painting. "The trouble is," he said at last, "that a man would not know how to approach him. It is only women who can do these things." Until the sitting was over neither the one nor the other spoke again. When it was over and Natalie was on the point of leaving the room, Masson looked at her critically. "You are pale," he remarked. "You are like a ghost." "Is it not becoming?" she asked. "Yes." "Then why complain?" She went to her own room and spent half an hour in collecting every valuable she owned. They were not many; she had always been recklessly improvident. She put together in a package her few jewels, and even the laces she considered worth the most. Then she went out, and, taking a _fiacre_ at the nearest corner, drove away. She was absent two hours, and when she returned she stopped at the entrance, intending to ask the _concierge_ a question. But the man himself spoke first. He was evidently greatly disturbed and not a little alarmed. "Mademoiselle," he began, "the young man on the sixth floor--" "What of him?" she demanded.