Presently on his somewhat aimless wanderings he came down the Avenue de l’Opéra and took a seat under the awning and ordered an innocuous drink. He was in a city where he had innumerable friends, but they had all left for the seashore and this loneliness was unpleasant to his friendly spirit. But even in the Café de Paris he was not to be left alone and he was regarded as fair game by alert hawkers. One would steal up to his table and deposit a little measure of olives and plead for two sous in exchange. Another would place some nuts by his side and demand a like amount. And when they had been driven forth and he had lighted a cigarette, he observed watching him with professional eagerness a _ramasseur de megot_, one of those men who make a livelihood of picking up the butts of cigars and cigarettes and selling them. When Monty flung down the half-smoked cigarette in hope that the man would go away he was annoyed to find that the fellow was congratulating himself that here was a tourist worth following, who smoked not the wispy attenuated cigarettes of the native but one worth harvesting. He probed for it with his long stick under the table and stood waiting for another. The heat, the absence of his friends and the knowledge that he must presently dine alone had brought the usually placid Monty into a wholly foreign frame of mind and he rose abruptly and stalked down the Avenue. A depressed-looking sandwich-man, bearing a device which read, “One can laugh uproariously at the Champs Elysées every night during the summer months,” blocked his way, and permitted a woman selling fans of the kind known to the _camelots_ as _les petits vents du nord_ to thrust one upon him. “Monsieur does not comprehend our heat in Paris,” she said. “Buy a little north wind. Two sous for a little north wind.” Monty thrust a franc in her hand and turned quickly from her to carom against a tall well-dressed man who was passing. As Monty began to utter his apology the look of gloom dropped from his face and he seized the stranger’s hand and shook it heartily. “Steve, old man!” he cried, “what luck to find you amid this mob! I’ve been feeling like a poor shipwrecked orphan, and here you come to my rescue again.” The man he addressed as Steve seemed just as pleased to behold Monty Vaughan. The two were old comrades from the days at their preparatory school and had met little during the past five years. Monty’s ecstatic welcome was a pleasant reminder of happy days that were gone. “I might ask what you are doing here,” Steven Denby returned. “I imagined you to be sunning yourself in Newport or Bar Harbor, not doing Paris in July.” “I’ve been living here for two years,” Monty explained, when they were sheltered from interruption at the café Monty had just left. “Doing what?” Monty looked at him with a diffident smile. “I suppose you’ll grin just like everybody else. I’m here to learn foreign banking systems. My father says it will do me good.”