“Why, that picture that Morgan wants.  It’s hanging in that pawnshop, behind the desk.  I didn’t say anything because Klein was there.  It’s the article sure as you live.  The girls are as natural as paint can make them, all measuring 36 and 25 and 42 skirts, if they had any skirts, and they’re doing a buck-and-wing on the bank of a river with the blues.  What did Mr. Morgan say he’d give for it?  Oh, don’t make me tell you.  They can’t know what it is in that pawnshop.”

When the pawnshop opened the next morning me and Silver was standing there as anxious as if we wanted to soak our Sunday suit to buy a drink.  We sauntered inside, and began to look at watch-chains.

“That’s a violent specimen of a chromo you’ve got up there,” remarked Silver, casual, to the pawnbroker.  “But I kind of enthuse over the girl with the shoulder-blades and red bunting.  Would an offer of $2.25 for it cause you to knock over any fragile articles of your stock in hurrying it off the nail?”

The pawnbroker smiles and goes on showing us plate watch-chains.

“That picture,” says he, “was pledged a year ago by an Italian gentleman.  I loaned him $500 on it.  It is called ‘Love’s Idle Hour,’ and it is by Leonardo de Vinchy.  Two days ago the legal time expired, and it became an unredeemed pledge.  Here is a style of chain that is worn a great deal now.”

At the end of half an hour me and Silver paid the pawnbroker $2,000 and walked out with the picture.  Silver got into a cab with it and started for Morgan’s office.  I goes to the hotel and waits for him.  In two hours Silver comes back.

“Did you see Mr. Morgan?” I asks.  “How much did he pay you for it?”

Silver sits down and fools with a tassel on the table cover.

“I never exactly saw Mr. Morgan,” he says, “because Mr. Morgan’s been in Europe for a month.  But what’s worrying me, Billy, is this:  The department stores have all got that same picture on sale, framed, for $3.48.  And they charge $3.50 for the frame alone—­that’s what I can’t understand.”

IV

THE DAY RESURGENT

I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number.

First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring.  Here his fancy may have free play.  A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill.  Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or whatever it was that Trilby called it.

Second—­the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework of lilies.  This is magazine-covery, but reliable.

Third—­Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade.

Fourth—­Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.