“You will understand, sare,” he said, in conclusion, “that these clothes such as yours see themselves in the best way when they are carried by a man very well made, and who ’as the air comme il faut.  I ’ave not the custom to say that I am justly that man.  But now we talk of affaires.  Look at me and see!” And so speaking, he drew himself up his full six feet, and turned slowly around.  There could not be any question about it:  a handsomer, a more distinguished-looking man was not to be found in all New York.  With the added dignity of age, his look of distinction would be but increased.

The great head of the great tailoring establishment was visibly affected.  Original devices in advertising had been the making of him.  He perceived that the device now suggested to him was superior to anything that his own genius had struck out.  “It’s a pretty good plan,” he said, meditatively.  “What do you want for carrying it out?”

“For you to serve two weeks, I ask but the clothes I go to wear.”

For a moment the tailor paused.  In that moment the destinies of Jaune d’Antimoine, of Rose Carthame, of the Count Siccatif de Courtray, hung in the balance.  It was life or death.  Jaune felt his heart beating like a trip-hammer.  There was upon him a feeling of suffocation.  The silence seemed interminable; and the longer it lasted, the more did he feel that his chances of success were oozing away, that the crisis of his life was going against him.  Darkness, the darkness of desolate despair, settled down upon his soul.  Mechanically he felt in his waistcoat pocket for a five-cent piece that he believed to be there—­for the stillness, the restful oblivion of the North River were in his mind.  His fingers clutched the coin convulsively, thankfully.  At least he would not be compelled’ to walk down Christopher Street to his death:  he could pay his way to eternity in the one-horse car.  Yet even while the blackness of shattered hope seemed to be closing him in irrevocably, the glad light came again.  As the voice of an angel sounded the voice of the tailor; and the words which the tailor spake were these: 

“Young man, it’s a bargain!”

But the tailor, upon whom Heaven had bestowed shrewdness to an extraordinary degree, perceived in the plan proposed to him higher, more artistic possibilities than had been perceived in it by its inventor.  There was a dramatic instinct, an appreciation of surprise, of climax, in this man’s mind that he proceeded to apply to the existing situation.  With a wave of his hand he banished the suggested sign on the walking advertiser’s back, and the suggested silken banner.  His plan at once was simpler and more profound.  Dressed in the highest style of art, Jaune was to walk Broadway daily between the hours of 11 A. M. and 2 P. M. He was to walk slowly; he was to look searchingly in the faces of all young women of about the age of twenty years; he was to wear, over and above his garments of price, an air of confirmed melancholy.  That was all.