"And the third man?" he asked.
"Ah yes, the third gentleman," said Bernstein. "I had forgotten him. The third gentleman I knew well. He had often been here. It was he who brought these friends to me. He was M. le Capitaine Stewart. Everybody knows M. le Capitaine Stewart. Everybody in Paris."
Again he observed that his visitor drew a little swift sharp breath, and that he seemed to be labouring under some excitement.
However, Ste. Marie did not question him further, and so he went on to tell the little more he knew of the matter: how the four people had remained for an hour or more, trying many poses; how they had returned, all but the tall gentleman, three days later to see the proofs, and to order certain ones to be printed—the young man paying on the spot in advance—and how the finished prints had been sent to M. le Capitaine Stewart's address.
When he had finished his visitor sat for a long time silent, his head bent a little, frowning upon the floor and chafing his hands together over his knees. But at last he rose rather abruptly. He said—
"Thank you very much indeed. You have done me a great service. If ever I can repay it command me. Thank you!"
The Jew protested, smiling, that he was still too deeply in debt to M. Ste. Marie, and so, politely wrangling, they reached the door, and, with a last expression of gratitude, the visitor departed down the stair. A client came in just then for a sitting and so the little photographer did not have an opportunity to wonder over the rather odd affair as much as he might have done. Indeed, in the press of work, it slipped from his mind altogether.
But down in the busy boulevard Ste. Marie stood hesitating on the curb. There were so many things to be done, in the light of these new developments, that he did not know what to do first.
"Mademoiselle Coira O'Hara!—Mademoiselle!" The thought gave him a sudden sting of inexplicable relief and pleasure. She would be O'Hara's daughter then. And the boy, Arthur Benham (there was no room for doubt in the photographer's description), had seemed to be badly in love with her. This was a new development indeed! It wanted thought, reflection, consultation with Richard Hartley. He signalled to a fiacre, and when it had drawn up before him, sprang into it, and gave Richard Hartley's address in the Avenue de l'Observatoire. But when they had gone a little way he changed his mind and gave another address, one in the Boulevard de la Tour Maubourg. It was where Mlle. Olga Nilssen lived. She had told him when he parted from her the evening before.
On the way he fell to thinking of what he had learnt from the little photographer Bernstein, to setting the facts, as well as he could, in order, endeavouring to make out just how much or how little they signified, by themselves or added to what he had known before. But he was in far too keen a state of excitement to review them at all calmly. As on the previous evening they seemed to him to loom to the skies, and again he saw himself successful in his quest—victorious, triumphant. That this leap to conclusions was but a little less absurd than the first did not occur to him. He was in a fine fever of enthusiasm, and such difficulties as his eye perceived lay in a sort of vague mist, to be dissipated later on, when he should sit quietly down with Hartley, and sift the wheat from the chaff, laying out a definite scheme of action.