"Mon Dieu! Come to the inner room, if you please, sir, and tell me more. What a good angel which has sent you here! Twenty-five years since I have seen my Paris. And the Tuileries, my friend, is it yet the same?" "Just the same, M'sieu, a million bare-legged children with short white socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps running wild after them. And the Eiffel Tower! But that's since your time, M'sieu Perrault?" "Ah--h, but have I not heard? Continue, continue, if you please, sir. You bring a strange joy to my heart. The Louvre, for example--you have been there, yes?" "Been there? Yes, and 'most googoo-eyed from looking at the pictures there--miles of 'em, aren't there?" "Oh-h! and Mona Lisa--yes!" "That dark one with the queer kind of a smile? She must have had green eyes, that one--green eyes with lights in them. And she kept them all guessing, I'll bet a hat, when she was alive--" and Bowen ran on till every blessed breakwater man silently stole away. Bowen and old Perrault had a three o'clock session that first night; and within the year he had married Claire. II Having completed his work on the wireless plant at the Navy Yard, Bowen thought himself due for a lay-off. And he did want to be home for a while, but orders came to have installed before the end of the year an experimental plant on Light-ship 67, which guarded Tide Rip Shoal to the eastward. Bowen, with his two helpers and his apparatus, took passage with Baldwin on the wheezy little _Whist_ to where, twenty miles east by south from the end of the breakwater, lay the tossing light-ship. Baldwin was well acquainted with old 67. Every once in a while the commandant would order Baldwin to make this trip for the accommodation of somebody or other in the yard. "But a wonder," he observed now, as he had observed a score of times before on nearing her--"a wonder they wouldn't put one of those new class o' steam lightships out here. If I was you, Bowen, I'd have an eye to the life-boat you see hanging to her stern there." "Why?" "Well, if the old hooker went adrift, you might need it." "What's her sails for?" "I dunno. I often wondered, though. They've been tied up, just like you see 'em now--stopped snug and neat between gaffs and booms--for, oh, I dunno--twenty years now, I reckon. I know I've yet to see 'em hoisted. But when'll I come and get you?" "I'll send word to the yard station by wireless, to Harty or whoever's on watch there, when we get it rigged." "All right. And say, a great thing that wireless, ain't it? Well, good luck." Baldwin gave the bell and the _Whist_ backed away. He rolled his wheel over, gave her another bell and around she came; then the jingle and ahead she went full-speed, which in smooth water was almost eight knots.