“Have it if you like. Money and what money buys is all I want from now on,” said Hazelton, and he shook his shoulders grossly and sensually while his nervous hands, the hands whose work the picture was, twisted themselves as though in agonized protest. Hazelton went back to his studio and stood before his blond pictures, the children of his heart. It was already evening, but they shone out in the dim light. He was a little tipsy. “So,” he said to them—“so all these years you have deceived me, as many a man has been deceived before by his beloved. Your flaunting smiles made me think you were what you are not. Dumont was right—my foster-child is better than you, for she made her way alone and without favor. I tried to think I had painted the impossible. Light is beyond me. Why should I think I could paint light? I am a child of darkness and misfortune. I know who my beloved is. You shall no longer work to support your sister!” “What are you doing?” came his wife’s querulous voice. “Talking and mumbling to yourself before your pictures in the dark? Are you drunk again?” ―――― Some months passed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse. “Hey! What are you doing so far from home?” cried Hazelton. “Looking for you.” “I was going to you,” Hazelton acknowledged. They stared at each other scrutinizingly, each measuring the other with dawning distrust. Each waited. “Let us go to the Rotonde,” Hazelton suggested. They talked of other things, each waiting for the other to begin. Hazelton had the most resistance; he had flipped a penny as to whether he should go to seek De Vilmarte, but De Vilmarte had made his decision with anguish. It was he who finally said: “You know—about the matter of the picture—my mother is quite frantic about my success. She is failing—” “_Toc!_” cried Hazelton. “My poor wife has to go to the hospital.” “Nothing to do, I know,” said De Vilmarte, looking away diffidently, “but for one’s mother—” “But for one’s wife,” Hazelton capped him, genially. “An aged mother and a sick wife, and a joke on the world shared between two friends— What will a man not do for his sick wife and for his aged mother!” A little shiver of cold disgust ran over Raoul. For the first time he felt a vague antipathy for Hazelton, his neck was so short and he rolled his big head in such a preposterous fashion. They said good-by, Hazelton’s swagger, De Vilmarte’s averted eyes betraying their guilty knowledge that they had bought and sold things that should not be for sale.