“But of the advertisement?  ’Ow ——­”

“Now, never you mind about the advertisement, young man.  Where that is going to come in is my business.  But you can just bet your bottom dollar that I don’t intend to lose any money on you.  All that you have to do is just what I’ve told you; and to be well dressed, and walk up and down Broadway for three hours every day, and look in all the girls’ faces, don’t strike me as being the hardest work that you might be set at.  Now come along and be measured, and day after to-morrow you shall begin.”

As Jaune walked slowly homeward to his dismal studio, he meditated deeply upon the adventure before him.  He did not fancy it at all; but it was the means to an end, and he was braced morally to go through with it without flinching.  For the chance of winning Rose he would have stormed a battery single-handed; and not a bit more of moral courage would have been needed for such desperate work than was needed for the execution of the bloodless but soul-trying project that he had in hand.  For the life and spirit of him, though, he could not see how the tailor was to get any good out of this magnificent masquerading.

In one of the evening papers, about a week later, there appeared a half-column romance that quite took Jaune d’Antimoine’s breath away.  It began with a reference to the distinguished elderly gentleman who, during the past week, had been seen daily upon Broadway about the hour of noon; who gazed with such intense though respectful curiosity into every ’young woman’s face; who, in the gay crowd, was conspicuous not less by the elegance of his dress than by his air of profound melancholy.  Then briefly, but precisely, the sorrowful story of the Marquis de ------ ("out of consideration for the nobleman’s feelings” the name was withheld) was told:  how, the son of a peer of France, he had married, while yet a minor, against the wishes of his stern father; how his young wife and infant daughter had been spirited away by the stern father’s orders; how on his death-bed the father had confessed his evil deed to his son, and had told that mother and child had been banished to America, where the mother speedily had died of grief, and where the child, though in ignorance of her noble origin, had been adopted by an enormously rich American, about whom nothing more was known than the fact that he lived in New York.  The Marquis, the article stated, now was engaged in searching for his long-lost daughter, and among other means to the desired end had hit upon this—­of walking New York’s chief thoroughfare in the faith that should he see his child his paternal instinct would reveal to him her identity.