"No; that was me, Monsieur. I have often been taken for a priest, especially when I am off duty. It is the smooth face that misled you--" and he passed his hand over his cheeks and chin. "You the priest!" This came as a distinct surprise. "Ah, yes, I do see the resemblance now. And so your sweetheart is the woman in the white cap." At last I had reached his tender spot. "No, you are wrong again, Monsieur. The woman in the white cap is my sister. My sweetheart is the little girl--my granddaughter, Susette." * * * * * I raised my own white umbrella over my head, picked up my sketch-trap, and took the path back to the river. The rain had ceased, the sun was shining--brilliant, radiant sunshine; all the leaves studded with diamonds; all the grasses strung with opals, every stone beneath my feet a gem. I didn't know when I left what became of Mademoiselle Ernestine Béraud, with her last lover under the sod, and the new one shut up in the kiosk, and I didn't care. I saw only a little girl--a little girl in a brown-madder dress and yellow-ochre hat; with big, blue eyes, a tiny pug-nose, a wee, kissable mouth, and two long pig-tails down her back. Looking down into her bonny face from its place, high up on the walls of the Prado, was an old cracked saint, his human eyes aglow with a light that came straight from heaven. "DOC" SHIPMAN'S FEE It was in the Doctor's own office that he told me this story. He has told me a dozen more, all pulled from the rag-bag of his experience, like strands of worsted from an old-fashioned reticule. Some were bright-colored, some were gray and dull--some black; most of them, in fact, sombre in tone, for the Doctor has spent much of his life climbing up the rickety stairs of gloomy tenements. Now and then there comes out a thread of gold which he weaves into the mesh of his talk--some gleam of pathos or heroism or unselfishness, lightening the whole fabric. This kind of story he loves best to tell. The Doctor is not one of your new-fashioned doctors quartered in a brownstone house off the Avenue, with a butler opening the door; a pair of bob-tailed grays; a coupé with a note-book tucked away in its pocket bearing the names of various millionnaires; an office panelled in oak; a waiting-room lined with patients reading last month's magazines until he should send for them. He has no such abode nor belongings. He lives all alone by himself in an old-fashioned house on Bedford Place--oh, Such a queer, hunched-up old house and such a quaint old neighborhood poked away behind Jefferson Market--and he opens the door himself and sees everybody who comes--there are not a great many of them nowadays, more's the pity.