It was the Fosdick footman who asked it. Albert started guiltily. Then he laughed, realizing that the hand-holding and the rest were no longer criminal offenses. He surrendered his luggage to the man. A few minutes later he and Madeline were in the limousine, which was moving rapidly up the Avenue. And Madeline was asking questions and he was answering and--and still it was all a dream. It COULDN'T be real. It was even more like a dream when the limousine drew up before the door of the Fosdick home and they entered that home together. For there was Mrs. Fosdick, as ever majestic, commanding, awe-inspiring, the same Mrs. Fosdick who had, in her letter to his grandfather, written him down a despicable, underhanded sneak, here was that same Mrs. Fosdick--but not at all the same. For this lady was smiling and gracious, welcoming him to her home, addressing him by his Christian name, treating him kindly, with almost motherly tenderness. Madeline's letters and Mrs. Fosdick's own letters received during his convalescence abroad had prepared him, or so he had thought, for some such change. Now he realized that he had not been prepared at all. The reality was so much more revolutionary than the anticipation that he simply could not believe it. But it was not so very wonderful if he had known all the facts and had been in a frame of mind to calmly analyze them. Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick was a seasoned veteran, a general who had planned and fought many hard campaigns upon the political battlegrounds of women's clubs and societies of various sorts. From the majority of those campaigns she had emerged victorious, but her experiences in defeat had taught her that the next best thing to winning is to lose gracefully, because by so doing much which appears to be lost may be regained. For Albert Speranza, bookkeeper and would-be poet of South Harniss, Cape Cod, she had had no use whatever as a prospective son-in-law. Even toward a living Albert Speranza, hero and newspaper-made genius, she might have been cold. But when that hero and genius was, as she and every one else supposed, safely and satisfactorily dead and out of the way, she had seized the opportunity to bask in the radiance of his memory. She had talked Albert Speranza and read Albert Speranza and boasted of Albert Speranza's engagement to her daughter before the world. Now that the said Albert Speranza had been inconsiderate enough to “come alive again,” there was but one thing for her to do--that is, to make the best of it. And when Mrs. Fletcher Fosdick made the best of anything she made the very best.