"Yes," he said at last, a little lamely. "This canvas was cut down for framing, and the signature was thrown so close to the edge that the frame conceals the name." He paused, then added, quietly: "I have kept my promise of silence, but now--do you want to hear of _him_?" She looked up--then shook her head, resolutely. "No," she said. CHAPTER XVI Late one evening in the cafe beneath the Elysee Palace Hotel, a tall man of something like thirty-five, though aged to the seeming of a bit more, sat over his brandy and soda and the perusal of a packet of letters. He wore traveling dress, and, though the weather had hardly the bitterness to warrant it, a fur-trimmed great-coat fell across the empty chair at his side. It was not yet late enough for the gayety that begins with midnight, and the place was consequently uncrowded. The stranger had left a taxicab at the door a few minutes before, and, without following his luggage into the office, he had gone directly to the cafe, to glance over his mail before being assigned to a room. The man was tall and almost lean. Had Steele entered the cafe at that moment, he would have rushed over to the seated figure, and grasped a hand with a feeling that his quest had ended, then, on second sight, he would have drawn back, incredulous and mystified. This guest lacked no feature that Robert Saxon possessed. His eyes held the same trace of the dreamer, though a close scrutiny showed also a hard glitter--his dreams were different. The hand that held the letter was marked front and back, though a narrow inspection would have shown the scar to be a bit more aggravated, more marked with streaked wrinkles about the palm. He and the American painter were as identical as models struck from one die in the lines and angles that make face and figure. Yet, in this man, there was something foreign and alien to Saxon, a difference of soul-texture. Saxon was a being of flesh, this man a statue of chilled steel. The envelope he had just cast upon the table fell face upward, and the waiting _garcon_ could hardly help observing that it was addressed to Senor George Carter, care of a steamship agency in the _Rue Scribe_. As Carter read the letter it had contained, his brows gathered first in great interest, then in surprise, then in greater interest and greater surprise.