with the list there on the desk."
Diane obeyed, though her eyes swam so that she could not tell one word
from another. "Is it all right? Then so much the better. You'll find me
at the same time to-morrow--if you're not late."

"Since you won't let me thank you, I must go without doing so," she
began, tremulously, "but I assure you--"

"You needn't assure me of anything, but just come again to-morrow."

She smiled through the mist over her eyes, and bowed.

"I shall not be--late," was all she ventured to say, and turned to leave
him.

She had reached the door, and half opened it, when she heard his voice
behind her.

"Stay! Just a minute! I'd like to shake hands with you, young woman."

Diane turned and allowed him to take her hand in a grip that hurt her.
She was so astounded by the suddenness of the act, as well as by the
rapidity with which he closed the door behind her, that her tears did
not actually fall until she found herself in the public department of
the bank, outside.

IV

On board the _Picardie_, steaming to New York, Mrs. Eveleth and Diane
were beginning to realize the gravity of the step they had taken. As
long as they remained in Paris, battling with the sordid details of
financial downfall, America had seemed the land of hope and
reconstruction, where the ruined would find to their hands the means
with which to begin again. The illusion had sustained them all through
the first months of living on little, and stood by them till the very
hour of departure. It faded just when they had most need of it--when the
last cliffs of France went suddenly out of sight in a thick fog-bank of
nothingness; and the cold, empty void, through which the steamer crept
cautiously, roaring from minute to minute like a leviathan in pain,
seemed all that the universe henceforth had to offer them. They would
have been astonished to know that, beyond the fog, Fate was getting the
New World ready for their reception, by creating among the rich those
misfortunes out of which not infrequently proceed the blessings of the
poor.

When that excellent aged lady, Miss Regina van Tromp, sister to the
well-known Paris banker, was felled by a stroke of apoplexy, the
personal calamity might, by a mind taking all things into account, have
been considered balanced by the circumstance that it was affording
employment to some refined woman of reduced means, capable of taking
care of the invalid. It had the further advantage t