down into a chair nearly breathless in his sitting-room, and he took my
cloak, and then poked the bright fire that was burning. On a small table
were some glasses and a decanter, and a few sandwiches. I surmised that
the secretary had been before us and arranged things, and discreetly
departed. My adventure appeared to me suddenly and over-poweringly in its
full enormity. 'Oh,' I sighed, 'if I were a man like you!' Then it was
that, gazing up at me from the fire, Diaz had said that he was not happy,
that he was forlorn.

'Yes,' he proceeded, sitting down and crossing his legs; 'I am profoundly
dissatisfied. What is my life? Eight or nine months in the year it is a
homeless life of hotels and strange faces and strange pianos. You do not
know how I hate a strange piano. That one'--he pointed to a huge
instrument which had evidently been placed in the room specially for
him--'is not very bad; but I made its acquaintance only yesterday, and
after to-morrow I shall never see it again. I wander across the world,
and everybody I meet looks at me as if I ought to be in a museum, and
bids me make acquaintance with a strange piano.'

'But have you no friends?' I ventured.

'Who can tell?' he replied. 'If I have, I scarcely ever see them.'

'And no home?'

'I have a home on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and I
loathe it.'

'Why do you loathe it?'