Really, did he believe in miracles? To put it bluntly: did he suppose that two failures added together made a success? Yes, two failures! He was an impecunious journalist or a discredited labor propagandist—which was it? And Janet! What had she to offer? A pirated soul (this to remind him of Claude Fontaine) and shattered prospects. "Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century." Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room. "Stay and talk to Robert," said Cornelia with frigid disdain. "He’s a great salvager of damaged reputations." Mazie looked inquiringly Robert’s way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained: "Cornelia says that Janet _went wrong_; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she’ll be _ruined for life_." Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once. "Ruined!" she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. "Say, people in the States won’t believe a girl is ’ruined’ nowadays, even when she’s committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who’s to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn’t ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet’s people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They’ll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn’t let on that he’s a gent from the U.S.A., or they’ll think she’s stringing them. Think! They’ll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there’s only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that’s to have somebody break into her bank account." Of the latter part of this choicely sustained opinion, Robert was the exclusive audience, Cornelia having already closed the door with a bang. *III* A little later in the morning Janet, glancing through a copy of _Le Matin_ three days old, caught sight of a familiar name in a telegraphic despatch from New York. The name was Fontaine. According to the brief news report, headed _C’est fini de rire!_ (the fun is over!), Fontaine and Company, the most noted of the Fifth Avenue dealers in precious stones, were charged with complicity in a sensational attempt at smuggling. Piecing the somewhat disjointed details together, Janet gathered that secret agents of the Department of Justice on the lookout for spies had inadvertently found thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds concealed in the bottom boards of what purported to be cases of Japanese books. The cases, which had been opened by the Secret Service agents shortly after the "Ionic" docked in Hoboken, were ostensibly consigned to a San Francisco book dealer for whom one Hutchins Burley, a New York editor and foreign correspondent, appeared as the representative.