"Quite true, Monsieur. He is not the only one. I know four." "And she began to love another in a week?" My indignation nearly got the better of me this time, but I do not think he noticed it. "Why not, Monsieur? One must live." As he spoke he moved an ash-tray deliberately within reach of my hand, and poured the balance of the St. Julien into my glass without a quiver. I smoked on in silence. Every spark of human feeling had evidently been stifled in him. The Juggernaut of Paris, in rolling over him, had broken every generous impulse, flattening him into a pulp of brutal selfishness. That is why his face was so smooth and cold, his eyes so dull and his voice so monotonous. I understood it all now. I changed the subject. I did not know where it would lead if I kept on. Drowned lovers were not what I was looking for. "You say you have only been two years in Suresne?" I resumed, carelessly, flicking the ashes from my cigar. "But two years, Monsieur." "Why did you leave Paris?" "Ah, when one is over fifty it is quite done. Is it not so, Monsieur?"--this made with a little deferential wave of his hand. I noted the tribute to the staid painter, and nodded approvingly. He was evidently climbing up to my level. Perhaps this plank, slender as it was, might take him out of the slough and land him on higher and better ground. "Yes, you are right. And so you came to Suresne to be quiet." "Not altogether, Monsieur. I came to be near--Well! we are never too old for that--Is it not so?" He said it quite simply, quite as a matter of course, the tones of his voice as monotonous as any he had yet used--just as he had spoken of poor Channet in the morgue with the water trickling over his dead face. "Oh, then, even at fifty you have a sweetheart!" I blurted out with a sudden twist of my probe. I felt now that I might as well follow the iniquity to the end. "It is true, Monsieur." "Is she pretty?" As long as I was dissecting I might at least discover the root of the disease. This remark, however, was not addressed to his face, but to a crumb of ashes on the cloth, which I was trying to remove with the point of a knife. He might not have answered, or liked it, had I fired the question at him point-blank. "Very pretty--" still the same monotone. "And you love her!" It was up to the hilt now. "She is the only thing I have left to love, Monsieur," he answered, calmly. Then, bending over me, he added: "Monsieur, I do not think I am mistaken. Were you not painting along the river this morning?" "Yes." "And a little child stood beside you while you worked?" Something in his voice as he spoke made me raise my head. To my intense amazement the listless eyes were alight with a tenderness that seemed to permeate his whole being, and a smile of infinite sweetness was playing about his mouth--the smile of the old saint--the Ribera of the Prado! "Yes, of course; the one playing with the priest," I answered, quickly. "But--"