"I want to know if you keep specimen prints of all the photographs you have made within the last few months, and if so I should like to see them."
The young Jew went to a wooden portfolio holder which stood in a corner and dragged it out into the light.
"I have them all here," said he, "everything that I have made within the past ten or twelve months. If you will let me draw up a chair you can look them over comfortably." He glanced at his former patron with a little polite curiosity as Ste. Marie followed his suggestion, and began to turn over the big portfolio's contents, but he did not show any surprise nor ask questions. Indeed he guessed—to a certain extent—rather near the truth of the matter. It had happened before that young gentlemen, and old ones too, wanted to look over his prints without offering explanations, and they generally picked out all the photographs there were of some particular lady, and bought them if they could be bought.
So he was by no means astonished on this occasion, and he moved about the room putting things to rights, and even went for a few moments into the studio beyond, until he was recalled by a sudden exclamation from his visitor, an exclamation which had a sound of mingled delight and excitement.
Ste. Marie held in his hands a large photograph, and he turned it towards the man who had made it.
"I am going to ask you some questions," said he, "that will sound rather indiscreet and irregular, but I beg you to answer them if you can, because the matter is of great importance to a number of people. Do you remember this lady?"
"Oh yes," said the Jew readily, "I remember her very well. I never forget people who are as beautiful as this lady was." His eyes gleamed with retrospective joy.
"She was splendid!" he declared, "sumptuous! No! I cannot describe her. I have not the words. And I could not photograph her with any justice either. She was all colour—brown skin with a dull red stain under the cheeks, and a great mass of hair that was not black but very nearly black—except in the sun, and then there were red lights in it. She was a goddess, that lady, a queen of goddesses: the young Juno before marriage, the——"
"Yes," interrupted Ste. Marie, "yes, I see. Yes, quite evidently she was beautiful, but what I wanted in particular to know was her name, if you feel that you have a right to give it to me (I remind you again that the matter is very important), and any circumstances that you can remember about her coming here; who came with her, for instance, and things of that sort."
The photographer looked a little disappointed at being cut off in the middle of his rhapsody, but he began turning over the leaves of an order-book which lay upon a table near by.