“Doesn’t he sign his pictures, either?” she demanded, finally.
For an instant, St. John hesitated awkwardly for an explanation.
“Yes,” he said at last, a little lamely. “This canvas was cut down for framing, and the signature was thrown so close to the edge that the frame conceals the name.” He paused, then added, quietly: “I have kept my promise of silence, but now—do you want to hear of him?”
She looked up—then shook her head, resolutely.
“No,” she said.
CHAPTER XVI
Late one evening in the café beneath the Elysée Palace Hôtel, a tall man of something like thirty-five, though aged to the seeming of a bit more, sat over his brandy and soda and the perusal of a packet of letters. He wore traveling dress, and, though the weather had hardly the bitterness to warrant it, a fur-trimmed great-coat fell across the empty chair at his side. It was not yet late enough for the gayety that begins with midnight, and the place was consequently uncrowded. The stranger had left a taxicab at the door a few minutes before, and, without following his luggage into the office, he had gone directly to the café, to glance over his mail before being assigned to a room.
The man was tall and almost lean. Had Steele entered the café at that moment, he would have rushed over to the seated figure, and grasped a hand with a feeling that his quest had ended, then, on second sight, he would have drawn back, incredulous and mystified. This guest lacked no feature that Robert Saxon possessed. His eyes held the same trace of the dreamer, though a close scrutiny showed also a hard glitter—his dreams were different. The hand that held the letter was marked front and back, though a narrow inspection would have shown the scar to be a bit more aggravated, more marked with streaked wrinkles about the palm. He and the American painter were as identical as models struck from one die in the lines and angles that make face and figure. Yet, in this man, there was something foreign and alien to Saxon, a difference of soul-texture. Saxon was a being of flesh, this man a statue of chilled steel.