`Say, George,' I said, `I didn't forget you this morning, did I?'

"`No, suh,' said George, 'you done give me a quarter.'

"`I guess you're mistaken, George,' says I, and I fished out a ten dollar
bill. You ought to have seen that nigger's eyes."

"`What's this for, Mister Ditmar?' says he.

"`For that lucky gold piece you found in lower seven,' I told him. `We'll
trade.'

"'Was you in lower seven?--so you was!' says George. Well, he had it all
right--you bet he had it. Now wasn't that queer? The very day you and I
began to know each other!"

"Wonderful!" Janet agreed. "Why don't you put it on your watch chain?"

"Well, I've thought of that," he replied, with the air of having
considered all sides of the matter. "But I've got that charm of the
secret order I belong to--that's on my chain. I guess I'll keep it in my
vest pocket."

"I didn't know you were so superstitious," she mocked.

"Pretty nearly everybody's superstitious," he declared. And she thought
of Lise.

"I'm not. I believe if things are going to happen well, they're going to
happen. Nothing can prevent it."

"By thunder" he exclaimed, struck by her remark. "You are like that
You're different from any person I ever knew...."

From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar. He spoke of a
large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago,
where he intended to take her. In the future he would never travel alone.
And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National
Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was. He gloried in her
innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his
cosmopolitanism. In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he
imagined, but her eyes shone. She had never even been in a sleeping car!
For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these
vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental
trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one's disposal.

"Neither of them would do me any good," she complained.

"You could go to the manicure," he said.

There had been in Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal
moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high,
festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as
Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a
special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the
company