“Well, you are a cheeky beggar, d’Antimoine,” said Vandyke Brown, cheerfully, the next morning, as he came into Jaune’s studio with a newspaper in his hand.  “So you are the Marquis who has been setting the town wild for the last week, eh?  And whom did you bet with?  And what started you in such a crazy performance, anyway?  Tell me all about it.  It’s as funny—­Good heavens! d’Antimoine, what’s the matter?  Are you ill?” For Jaune had grown deathly pale and was gasping.

“I do not know of what it is that you talk,” he answered, with a great effort.

“Oh, come now, that’s too thin, you know.  Why, here’s a whole column about it, telling how you made a bet with somebody that you could set all the town to talking about you, and yet do it all in such a clever disguise that nobody would know who you really were, not even your most intimate friends.  And I should say that you had won handsomely.  Why, I’ve seen you on Broadway a dozen times myself this last week, and I never had the remotest suspicion that the Marquis was you.  I must say, though,” continued Brown, reflectively, and looking closely at Jaune, “that it was stupid of me.  I did think that you had a familiar sort of look; and once, I remember, it did occur to me that you looked astonishingly like yourself.  It—­it was the clothes, you see, that threw me out.  Where ever did you get such a stunning rig?  I don’t believe that I’d have known you dressed like that, even if you hadn’t been gray and wrinkled.  But tell me all about it, old man.  It must have been jolly fun!”

“Fun!” groaned Jaune; “it was the despair!” And then, his heart being very full and his longing for sympathy overpowering, Jatine told Brown the whole story.  “But what is this of one bet, my dear Van,” he concluded, “I do not of the least know.”

“Well, here it all is in the paper, anyway.  Calls you ’a distinguished animal-painter,’ and alludes to your ’strikingly vigorous “Lioness and Cubs” and powerful “Dray Horses” at the last spring exhibition of the Society of American Artists.’  Must be somebody who knows you, you see, and somebody who means well by you, too.  There’s nothing at all about your being an advertisement; indeed, there’s nothing in the story but a good joke, of which you are the hero.  It’s an eccentric sort of heroism, to be sure; but then, for some unknown reason, people never seem to believe that artists are rational human beings, so your eccentricity will do you no harm.  And it’s no end of an advertisement for you.  Whoever wrote it meant well by you.  And, by Jove!  I know who it is!  It’s little Conte Crayon.  He’s a good-hearted little beggar, and he likes you ever so much, for I’ve heard him say so; but how he ever got hold of the story, and especially of such a jolly version of it, I don’t see.”