hat?'

Madame Proquet remained incredulous and full of anxiety. She certainly
was not going to discourage her son, but she could not find it in her
to encourage him. She would let events follow their course, while she
remained calm at her post of observation. She had every confidence in
her son after all. Was he not an advocate, and could he not always
return to his profession if painting should fail him?

The following year Henri exhibited another portrait, which excited not
merely the admiration but the enthusiasm of the critics. People talked
of a future Bonnat, and the name of Henri Proquet was on everyone's
tongue. The young painter was striding into fame.

Orders began to flow in. This news reassured Madame Proquet, and made
her mother's heart swell with pride.

'Did I not tell you so?' repeated Fanchette.

But something that dropped like a bomb into the quiet household in the
little Breton town was the news that a rich financier of the Faubourg
Saint-Honore had just paid 10,000 francs for his portrait, which Henri
had taken hardly a month to paint.

'But the dear fellow will be making a fortune and losing his head,'
exclaimed Madame Proquet.

Fanchette herself was dumfounded. It seemed to them that their boy was
going to slip from them--that fame and fortune must needs raise an
inseparable barrier between the luxurious studio which Henri talked of,
and was embellishing day by day, and the humble maternal home which
never changed at all. They were both believers in the quiet and
unobtruding happiness that hides itself and goes unenvied, and they
could neither of them understand how happiness was possible in that
feverish Paris, where artists and men of letters are drawn body and
soul into the whirl of a great vortex; and the good souls bewailed
themselves, foreseeing terrible things and getting into their heads a
thousand ideas, which all had but one conclusion--'Our Henri is lost to
us!'

How mistaken they were!

The years followed one another, and Henri came regularly twice a year
to the dear little house where the ivy and jasmine, the clematis and
the honeysuckle protected our successful man against intruders: the
jealous, the gossips, the bores and all the jostling crowd that hovers
around celebrities, and often makes them its prey.

Better than that, he soon did something that should still strengthen
his position in the good books of Madame Proquet and Fanchette. He
married a girl as good as she