There was no answer. Harkless's chair was directly in front of the mantel-piece, and upon the carved wooden shelf, amongst tobacco-jars and little curios, cotillion favors and the like, there were scattered a number of photographs. One of these was that of a girl who looked straight out at you from a filigree frame; there was hardly a corner of the room where you could have stood without her clear, serious eyes seeming to rest upon yours. “Cherchez la femme?” repeated Tom, puffing unconsciously. “Pickle was a good fellow, but he had the deuce of an eye for a girl. Do you remember--” He stopped short, and saw the man and the photograph looking at each other. Too late, he unhappily remembered that he had meant, and forgotten, to take that photograph out of the room before he brought Harkless in. Now he would have to leave it; and Helen Sherwood was not the sort of girl, even in a flat presentment, to be continually thrown in the face of a man who had lost her. And it always went hard, Tom reflected, with men who stretched vain hands to Helen, only to lose her. But there was one, he thought, whose outstretched hands might not prove so vain. Why couldn't she have cared for John Harkless? Deuce take the girl, did she want to marry an emperor? He looked at Harkless, and pitied him with an almost tearful compassion. A feverish color dwelt in the convalescent's cheek; the apathy that had dulled his eyes was there no longer; instead, they burned with a steady fire. The image returned his unwavering gaze with inscrutable kindness. “You heard that Pickle shot himself, didn't you?” Meredith asked. There was no answer; John did not hear him. “Do you know that poor Jeny Haines killed himself, last March?” Tom said sharply. There was only silence in the room. Meredith got up and rattled some tongs in the empty fireplace, but the other did not move or notice him in any way. Meredith set the tongs down, and went quietly out of the room, leaving his friend to that mysterious interview. When he came back, after a remorseful cigarette in the yard, Harkless was still sitting, motionless, looking up at the photograph above the mantel-piece. They drove abroad every day, at first in the victoria, and, as Harkless's strength began to come back, in a knock-about cart of Tom's, a light trail of blue smoke floating back wherever the two friends passed. And though the country editor grew stronger in the pleasant, open city, Meredith felt that his apathy and listlessness only deepened, and he suspected that, in Harkless's own room, where the photograph reigned, the languor departed for the time, making way for a destructive fire. Judge Briscoe, paying a second visit to Rouen, told Tom, in an aside, that their friend did not seem to be the same man. He was altered and aged beyond belief, the old gentleman whispered sadly.