He is not wandering all the time over France, or flashing meteor-like about Europe. He has periods of repose, enforced and otherwise. But his position being ensured, he has no anxieties. Paris is his headquarters. He lives still in his old _hôtel meublé_ in the Faubourg Saint-Denis. But instead of one furnished room on the fifth floor, he can afford an apartment, salon, salle à manger, bedrooms, cabinet de toilette, on the prosperous second, which he retains all the year round. And Petit Patou can now stride through the waiting crowd in Moignon's antechamber and enter the sacred office, cigar in mouth, and with a "look here, _mon vieux_," put the fear of God into him. Petit Patou and Prépimpin, the idols of the Provinces, have arrived. In Paris, when their presences coincide, he continues to consort with Bakkus, whose exquisite little tenor voice still affords him a means of livelihood. In fact Bakkus has had a renewed lease of professional activity. He sings at watering places, at palace hotels; which involves the physical activity which he abhors. "Bound to this Ixion wheel of perpetual motion," says he, "I suffer tortures unimagined even by the High Gods. Compared with it our degrading experience on the sands seven years ago was a blissful idyll." "By Gum!" says Andrew, "seven years ago. Who would have thought it?" "Yes, who?" scowled the pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue, ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven æons of Promethean damnation." "To me it seems only yesterday," says Andrew. "It's because you have no brain," says Bakkus. But they are good friends. Away from Paris they carry on a fairly regular correspondence. Such of Bakkus's letters as Lackaday has kept and as I have read, are literary gems with--always--a perverse and wilful flaw ... like the man's life. * * * * * From Paris, after this particular meeting with Bakkus, Andrew once more goes on tour with Prépimpin. But a Prépimpin grown old, and, though pathetically eager, already past effective work. Nine years of strenuous toil are as much as any dog can stand. Rheumatism twinged the hind legs of Prépimpin. Desire for slumber stupefied his sense of duty. He could no longer catch the lighted cigar and swagger off with it in his mouth, across the stage. "And yet, I'm sure," writes Lackaday, "that every time I cut his business, it nearly broke his heart. And it had come to Prépimpin's business being cut down to an insignificant minimum. I could, of course, have got another dog. But it would have broken his heart altogether. And one doesn't break the hearts of creatures like Prépimpin. I managed to arrange the performance, at last, so that he should think he was doing a devil of a lot...." Then the end came. It was on the Bridge of Avignon, which, if you will remember, Lackaday superstitiously regards as a spot fraught with his destiny.