he
set foot in New York, and she entered the fray vigorously now.

"We don't know much about him, and that's the truth, Mr. Devar," she
cried. "There was some family disagreement years ago, and the brothers
lost track of each other, but Horace here never forgets a name, and why
should he, seeing that John was his father's name, and Delancy his
mother's, and our nephew has both, so the minute we saw that paragraph
in the Chicago papers about the eminent American engineer who had been
building railways in China being on board the _Lusitania_, I says to
Horace: 'Horace, it would be shame on us if we allowed your brother's
son and your own nephew to arrive in New York without some of his kith
and kin to bid him welcome,' and with that we hustled to catch the next
train east, but the steamer did the trip quicker'n we counted on, and
we just missed being at the docks, so if it hadn't been for our good
luck in finding the man who helped John with his baggage, and who
remembered the name of the hotel he gave the taxi-driver, we might have
been searching New York all this blessed night without dreaming of
coming to such a place as this, because the newspapers spoke so highly
of John that we made sure he would be stopping in one of the Fifth
Avenue hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria or Hoffman House, or perhaps
higher uptown, in the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza."

Mrs. Curtis was stout, so she yielded perforce to lack of breath, and
Devar was able to explain smilingly that he, and none other, was
responsible for the item in the newspapers.

"The fact is that I took a great liking to John D.," he said. "He is
such a real good fellow, and so sublimely unconscious of his own
merits, that I wanted to surprise him by starting a modest boom in the
press, so I sent a wireless message about him to a journalistic friend
in New York. I wondered why the reporters did not get hold of him when
they came aboard at the quarantine station, but I remember now that, by
some curious trick of fate, he and I stowed ourselves away in a part of
the ship where no one was likely to find us, and I clean forgot to put
them on his track when I went below."

"I guess my nephew has attended to the booming proposition on his own
account," said Horace, getting under way at last.

Devar laughed, but Mrs. Curtis was shocked.

"Horace!" she cried indignantly, "that's the only unkind thing I've
heard you say in years. Oh, yes,"--for her husband had spread his