trying to pry into the secret of the hidden eyes.  Jaune’s blood rushed up into his face, and he realized that detection was imminent.  Mercifully, at that moment the crowd opened, and with a bow that hid his face behind his hat he made good his retreat.  During the remaining half hour of his walk, he thought no more of metaphysics.  The horrid danger of physical discovery from which he had escaped so narrowly filled him with a shuddering alarm.  Nor could he banish from his mind the harrowing thought that perhaps, for all his gray hair and painted wrinkles and fine clothes, Rose in truth had recognized him.

That night an irresistible attraction drew him to the Carthame abode.  In the little parlor he found the severe Madame Carthame, her adorable daughter, and the offensive Count Siccatif de Courtray.  Greatly to his relief, his reception was in the usual form:  Madame Carthame conducted herself after the fashion of a well-bred iceberg; Rose endeavored to mitigate the severity of her parent’s demeanor by her own affability; the Count, as much as possible, ignored his presence.  Jaune could not repress a sigh of relief.  She had not recognized him.

But his evening was one of trial.  With much vivacity, Rose entertained the little company with an account of her romantic adventure with the French nobleman who had come to America in quest of his lost daughter; for she had read the newspaper story, and had identified its hero with the assailant of her heel.  She dwelt with enthusiasm upon the distinguished appearance of the unhappy foreigner; she ventured the suggestion, promptly and sternly checked by her mamma, that she herself might be the lost child; she grew plaintive, and expressed a burning desire to comfort this stricken parent with a daughter’s love, and, worst of all, she sat silent, with a far-away look in her charming eyes, and obviously suffered her thoughts to go astray after this handsome Marquis in a fashion that made even the Count Siccatif de Courtray fidget, and that filled the soul of Jaune d’Antimoine with a consuming jealousy—­not the less consuming because of the absurd fact that it was jealousy of himself!  As he walked home that night through the devious ways of Greenwich to his dismal studio, he seriously entertained the wish that he never had been born.

The next day all the morning papers contained elaborate “interviews” with the Marquis:  for each of the several reporters who had been put on the case, believing that he alone had failed to get the facts, and being upheld by a lofty determination that no other reporter should “get a beat on him,” had evolved from his own inner consciousness the story that Jaune, for the best of reasons, had refused to tell.  The stories thus told, being based upon the original fiction, bore a family resemblance to each other; and as all of them were interesting, they stimulated popular curiosity in regard to their hero to a very high pitch.  As the result of them,