The picture was sold to a Spanish nobleman, who said it reminded him of Velasquez's "Æsop"; he was so delighted with the painter's power that he commissioned Peter to portray his own long, pale, melancholy visage. Whereupon the two Checkleighs and Stocks called loudly for a proper celebration, and Peter honored their clamorous demand. It was a memorable affair, graced by the Quartier's darlingest models, who had long since voted M'sieu Champnees a _bon garçon_. A Spanish student, in a velvet coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host's countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art. Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine. She sat on his knee to perform the operation, scanned his clean face with satisfaction, and taking him by the ears as by handles, kissed him gaily. Then she went back to her own _chèr ami_, who wasn't in the least disturbed. "It is like kissing thy maiden aunt, Jacques," she told him. "Now, with thee--" They looked at each other eloquently, and Peter Champneys, whose eyes had followed the girl, smiled crookedly. An unaccountable gloom descended upon him. All these lusty young men shouting and laughing around him, all these handsome, ardent young women, snatched what joy from life they could; they lived their hour, knowing how brief that hour must be. They ate to-day, starved to-morrow; but they were rich because they loved, because they laughed, because theirs was the passionate unforced comradeship, the intoxicating joy of youth. Peter Champneys, whose good luck was being celebrated, looked at his penniless, hilarious comrades, and twisted a smile of desperate gaiety to his lips. He had never in his life felt more utterly alone. The affair ended at six o'clock the next morning, in a last glad, mad romp up the Boul' Miche. Peter and Stocks waved good-by to the last revelers, looking somewhat jaded in the fresh morning air. The two young men, both rather tired, walked slowly. Venders in clacking sabots pushed their carts ahead of them, shouting their wares. Crowds of working-people poured through the streets. At a little restaurant they knew, they had coffee and rolls. While they were drinking, a girl came in. Peter looked up and saw Denise. His first thought was that she would have been lovely if she hadn't been so thin. Then he saw how shabby she was, and how neat. Nothing could have been more charming than her chestnut hair, or her blue eyes that had a look of innocence, or her fair and transparent complexion, though one could have wished she were rosier. She did not look around with the quick, alert, bright glance of the Parisienne whom everything interests and amuses; she had the abstracted and sad air of a child who suffers, and whom suffering bewilders. Stocks said, in a low voice, tinged with pity: