"Cartaret!" he cried. "Charlie Cartaret! But I know him well." "Eh?"--The composer was reproachful--"And you never presented him to me?" "It never happened that you were by." "My faith! Why should I be? Am I not Houdon? You should have brought him to me. Is it that you at the same time consider yourself my friend and do not bring to me your millionaire?" Seraphin's laughter waxed. "But he is not my millionaire: he is your millionaire only. I know well that he is as poor as we are." The musician's imaginary melody ceased: one could almost hear it cease. He gazed at Seraphin as he might have gazed at a madman. "But that room rents for a hundred francs a month!" "He is in debt for it." "And his name is that of a rich American well known." "An uncle who does not like him." "And he has offered to provide this collation." Seraphin shrugged. "M. Cartaret's credit," said he, with a glance at Madame, "seems to be better than mine. I tell you he is only a young art-student, enough genteel, and the relation of a man enough rich, but for himself--poof!--he is one of us." CHAPTER III IN WHICH A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED Money's the still sweet-singing nightingale.--Herrick: _Hesperides_. Seraphin Dieudonné told the truth: at that moment Charlie Cartaret--for all this, remember, preceded the coming of the Vision--at that moment Cartaret was seated in his room in the rue du Val-de-Grâce, wondering how he was to find his next month's rent. His trouble was that he had just sold a picture, for the first time in his life, and, having sold it, he had rashly engaged to celebrate that good fortune by a feast which would leave him with only enough to buy meals for the ensuing three weeks. He was a rather fine-looking, upstanding young fellow of a type essentially American. In the days, not long distant, when the goal at the other end of the gridiron had been the only goal of his ambition, he had put hard muscles on his hardy frame; later he had learned to shoot in Arizona; and he even now would have looked more at home along Broadway or Halsted Street than he did in the rue St. Jacques or the Boulevard St. Michel. He was tow-haired and brown-eyed and clean-shaven; he was generally hopeful, which is another way of saying that he was still upon the flowered slope of twenty-five.