The next day, humble and chastened in spirit, I kissed the rod, and went into the city to search for a situation. I determined to start at Forty-second Street, and work my way down town until I found a place that looked as though it could afford a foreign correspondent. But I had reached Twenty-eighth Street, without seeing any place that appealed to me, when a little groom, in a warm fur collar and chilly white breeches, ran up beside me and touched his hat. I was so surprised that I saluted him in return, and then felt uneasily conscious that that was not the proper thing to do, and that forever I had lost his respect. “Miss Fiske would like to speak with you, sir,” he said. He ran back to a brougham that was drawn up beside the curb behind me, and opened the door. When I reached it, Miss Fiske leaned from it, smiling. “I couldn’t help calling you back, Captain Macklin,” she said, and held out her hand. When I took it she laughed again. “Isn’t this like our last meeting?” she asked. “Don’t you remember my reaching out of the carriage, and our shaking hands? Only now,” she went on, in a most frank and friendly manner, “instead of a tropical thunder-storm, it’s a snow-storm, and instead of my running away from your shells, I’m out shopping. At least, mother’s out shopping,” she added. “She’s in there. I’m waiting for her.” She seemed to think that the situation required a chaperon. “You mustn’t say they were my shells, Miss Fiske,” I protested. “I may insult a woman for protecting her brother’s life, but I never fire shells at her.” It did not surprise me to hear myself laughing at the words which, when she spoke them, had seemed so terrible. It was as though none of it had ever occurred. It was part of a romantic play, and we had seen the play together. Who could believe that the young man, tramping the streets on the lookout for a job, had ever signed his name, as vice-president of Honduras, to a passport for Joseph Fiske; that the beautiful girl in the sables, with her card-case in her hand, had ever heard the shriek of shrapnel? And she exclaimed, just as though we had both been thinking aloud: “No, it’s not possible, is it?” “It never happened,” I said. “But I tell you what has happened,” she went on, eagerly, “or perhaps you know. Have you heard what my father did?” I said I had not. I refrained from adding that I believed her father capable of doing almost anything. “Then I’m the first to tell you the news,” she exclaimed. She nodded at me energetically. “Well, he’s paid that money. He owed it all the time.’ “That’s not news,” I said. She flushed a little, and laughed. “But, indeed, father was not to blame,” she exclaimed. “They deceived him dreadfully. But when we got home, he looked it up, and found you were right about that money, and so he’s paid it back, not to that odious Alvarez man, but in some way, I don’t quite understand how, but so the poor people will get it.” “Good!” I cried.