I realized that they were moving towards the door and shook myself out of my entranced silence. "But you _can't_ buy a press of that kind in Paris!" I called after them, all the bitterness of my past struggles in my voice. "You can't buy anything in war-time France. There hasn't been a press or anything else manufactured in France for two years! Don't you know that all the factories are making munitions?" Mr. Robert J. Hall--that was the name on the card--came back to me and said earnestly: "Money can't _do_ everything, but I tell you that it can buy anything buyable if you've got enough of it. Now we'll give you money enough to buy that press. It's up to you to find it." From the doorway his wife smiled to mitigate his intense seriousness and said again, "It's the kind that opens and shuts its jaws, you know." The door swung shut behind them to a last call-to-arms, "Go to it!" from Mr. Hall. Five minutes later a proof-reader coming found me still standing, staring at their card. "What's the matter?" she asked. I took her by the arm. "Look here," I said, "did I just show two visitors around the place?" "Do you mean that awfully good-looking man with the white hair and the royal-princess-effect in sables and eyes like Trilby's?" I nodded, reassured. I had not dreamed them! * * * * * Of course I went to it. Of course I found the press. After such a galvanic shock, I could have found, if that had been my need, a featherbed on the Arc de l'Étoile. I have too many other things to tell you about the Halls to describe the hunt after the press, although in its way that was epic, too. Enough to say that after three weeks of impassioned concentration on the subject during which I ate, drank, slept, and lived printing-press, it was located, a second-hand one in excellent condition, in a loft in the remotest corner of a remote industrial region of Paris. It was quite exactly what we needed, a thousand times better than anything we had dreamed of having. I felt almost a reverent admiration to see it opening and shutting its great jaw, and spewing out perfect raised-type pages, at least twelve times faster than our wretched hand press; doing in one day the work of two weeks! But the price! Like all war prices it was five times what it was worth when new. I hadn't the least idea that my extraordinary visitors would buy it for us. Why in the world should they? In fact, by that time I had gone back to thinking that I had dreamed them. However, I betook myself to their hotel, into their private sitting-room, bright with chintz and copper and flowers. I found Mrs. Hall without her hat even lovelier than before, a little gray in her thick soft hair as honestly shown as the faint, fine lines of simple kindness in her clear skin. She wore a dark-blue satin dress richly embroidered, evidently a creation from one of the great Paris houses. She assured me cordially that she was awfully glad to see me.