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 Nôtre 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 Panthéon’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.