Marie had
once seen in company with O'Hara should be taken as significant of
anything except an appreciation of beauty on the part of Miss Benham's
uncle--not even if, as Mlle. Nilssen believed, Captain Stewart was in
love with the lady. But to Ste. Marie, in his whirl of reawakened
excitement, the discovery loomed to the skies, and in a series of
ingenious but very vague leaps of the imagination he saw himself, with
the aid of this new evidence (which was no evidence at all, if he had
been calm enough to realize it), victorious in his great quest: leading
young Arthur Benham back to the arms of an ecstatic family, and kneeling
at the feet of that youth's sister to claim his reward. All of which
seems a rather startling flight of the imagination to have had its
beginning in the sight of one photograph of a young woman. But, then,
Ste. Marie was imaginative if he was anything.

He fell to thinking of this girl whose eyes, after one sight of them,
had so long haunted him. He thought of her between those two men, the
hard-faced Irish adventurer, and the other, Stewart, strange compound of
intellectual and voluptuary, and his eyes flashed in the dark and he
gripped his hands together upon his knees. He said again:

"I won't believe it! I won't believe it!" Believe what? one wonders.

He slept hardly at all: only, toward morning, falling into an uneasy
doze. And in the doze he dreamed once more the dream of the dim, waste
place and the hill, and the eyes and voice that called him back--because
they needed him.

As early as he dared, after his morning coffee, he took a fiacre and
drove across the river to the Boulevard de la Madeleine, where he
climbed a certain stair, at the foot of which were two glass cases
containing photographs of, for the most part, well-known ladies of the
Parisian stage. At the top of the stair he entered the reception-room of
a young photographer who is famous now the world over, but who, at the
beginning of his career, when he had nothing but talent and no
acquaintance, owed certain of his most important commissions to M. Ste.
Marie.

The man, whose name was Bernstein, came forward eagerly from the studio
beyond to greet his visitor, and Ste. Marie complimented him chaffingly
upon his very sleek and prosperous appearance, and upon the new
decorations of the little salon, which were, in truth, excellently well
judged. But after they had talked for a little while of such matters, he
said:

"I