“I calculate that this will rather whoop up public interest in our performance,” said the tailor, cheerfully, the next day, as he handed the newspaper containing the pleasing fiction to Jaune.  “That’s my idea, for a starter.  I’ve got the whole story ready to come out in sections—­paid a literary feller twenty dollars to get it up for me.  And you be careful to-day when you are interviewed” (Jaune shuddered) “to keep the story up—­or” (for Jaune was beginning a remonstrance) “you can keep out of it altogether, if you’d rather.  Say you must refuse to talk upon so delicate a subject, or something of that sort.  Yes, that’s your card.  It’ll make the mystery greater, you know—­and I’ll see that the public gets the facts, all the same.”

The tailor chuckled, and Jaune was unutterably wretched.  He was on the point of throwing up his contract.  He opened his mouth to speak the decisive words—­and shut it again as the thought came into his mind that his misery must be borne, and borne gallantly, because it was all for the love of Rose.

That day there was no affectation in his air of melancholy.  He was profoundly miserable.  Faithful to his contract, he looked searchingly upon the many young women of twenty years whom he met; and such of them as were possessors of tender hearts grew very sorrowful at sight of the obvious woe by which he was oppressed.  His woe, indeed, was keen, for the newspaper article had had its destined effect, and he was a marked man.  People turned to look at him as people had not turned before; it was evident that he was a subject of conversation.  Several times he caught broken sentences which he recognized as portions of his supposititious biography.  His crowning torture was the assault of the newspaper reporters.  They were suave, they were surly, they were insinuatingly sympathetic, they were aggressively peremptory—­but all alike were determined to wring from him to the uttermost the details of the sorrow that he never had suffered, of the life that he never had lived.  It was a confusing sort of an experience.  He began to wonder, at last, whether or not it were possible that he could be somebody else without knowing it; and if it were, in whom, precisely, his identity was vested.  Being but a simple-minded young fellow, with no taste whatever for metaphysics, this line of thought was upsetting.

While involved in these perplexing doubts and the crowd at the Fifth Avenue crossing, he was so careless as to step upon the heel of a lady in front of him.  And when the lady turned, half angrily, half to receive his profuse apologies, he beheld Mademoiselle Carthame.  The face of this young person wore an expression made up of not less than three conflicting emotions:  of resentment of the assault upon the heel of her one pair of good shoes, of friendly recognition of the familiar voice, of blank surprise upon perceiving that this voice came from the lips of a total stranger.  She looked searchingly upon the smoked glasses, obviously