e of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal
to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was
breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the
area.

At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but
the _concierge_ stood near.

"_Cordon?_" inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal
word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate
to let them in or out.

Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his
pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.

He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with
perfect distinctness:

"_Cordon, s'il vous plait._"

The _concierge_ knew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next
question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.

"_Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d'hui?_"

Once more, Saxon's lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.

"_Oui, merci_," he responded.

The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of the
_Rue St. Jacques_, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of
Captain Harris' clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and
bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered
away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the
world were to him things without names or meaning.

His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally
he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square
towers of _Notre Dame_, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes
picked out the carvings of the "Last Judgment" and the _Galerie des
Rois_.

He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without
purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time,
he had before him the _Pantheon's_ entrance, and confronting him on
its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin's unspeakably
melancholy conception, "_le Penseur_," and it might have stood for
Saxon's self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in,
in the agony of brooding thought-travail.

Then, Saxon's head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused
groping, as though reason's tentacles were struggling out blindly for
something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the
prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting
into being of thought's first coherent germ. But from "_le Penseur_"
Saxon