"Nothing?" he demanded. His eyes challenged her. "Nothing, Irene?" "Oh, my dearest," she wept, smiling, "if my love's enough----?" VI PICQ PLAYS THE HERO When he had made his choice of a career, when in spite of remonstrances he had become an actor, his father had felt disgraced. His father was the hatter in the rue de la Paroisse. The shop was not prosperous--in Ville-Nogent people made their hats last a long while--but it was at least a shop, and the old man wished his son to be respectable. This, you see, was France. The little French hatter had not heard that, across the Channel, the scions of noble houses turned actors, and he would not have believed it if he had been told. Once, the son of a little French tradesman humiliated his father by going on the stage and became the admiration of the world; but this tradesman's son did not distinguish himself like that. Indeed, he did not distinguish himself at all. Many years later the hatter patted the artist's hand, and said feebly: "After I am gone, take a hat, my poor Olivier. Heaven knows thou needest one!" A hat, and his blessing were well-nigh all he had to give by this time. In his youthful dreams--day-dreams behind the counter--Olivier Picq had seen himself a leading man in Paris, making impassioned love in the limelight to famous actresses. His engagements had proved so different from his dreams that not once had he attained to the hero's part, even in the least significant of provincial holes. No manager could be induced to regard him as a hero. By slow degrees he had ceased to expect it. By still slower degrees he ceased to expect even parts of prominence. He was the fatuous valet, who came on, with the laughing chambermaid, to explain what the characters that mattered had been doing between the acts; he was the gaby that made inane remarks, in order that the low comedian might reply with something funny; he was the moody defaulter that committed suicide early in the piece--and he changed his wig (alas! not his voice) to become the uninteresting figure that broke the tragic tidings to the widow. "Ah," says the reader, "he wasn't clever. That's why he didn't get on." Well, it is not pretended that Picq had genius; for such parts as fell to him he had not even marked ability. But the truth is, that in the rôle of romantic hero, which he had not had a chance to play, he would have been good. The laughing chambermaid used to say he would have been splendid. Often they grieved over the bad luck that had attended him, as they reviewed the years of struggle, hand in hand. He had married the chambermaid. "Oh, I can guess the end of this story already!" says the reader. "He became a leading man in Paris, after all."