ensed version of the original draft, smoothed
away the slight hindrance of foreign money tendered in payment, and
arranged the due delivery of a reply. Perhaps he smiled when he read
what she had written. The words were comprehensible even to one who
did not understand English:

"_Andromeda_ lost. Arrived here safely. Address, Yorke, Maceio."

There was a space at the foot of the form on which it was necessary to
subscribe her name and local address. So she wrote, "Iris Yorke,
steamship _Unser Fritz_, Maceio harbor." Hozier was standing by her
side as she printed the words legibly. She looked up at him with a
curiously tense expression that he did not fathom immediately. They
were in the busy main street again ere its meaning occurred to him.
The cable committed her irrevocably. She felt that she was signing her
own condemnation!

Among the four people, therefore, who entered the Hotel Grande in the
Rua do Sul there were two whose feelings were the reverse of cheerful.
But convention is stronger than the primal impulses--sometimes it
triumphs over death itself--and convention was all-powerful now. It
led Iris away captive in the train of the smiling and voluble Senhora
Pondillo, and it immersed Hozier in a tangle of fearsome words which
turned out to be the stock in trade of a clothier. The mere male of
Maceio decks himself with gay plumage. Philip was hard put to it
before he secured some garments which did not irresistibly recall the
heroes of certain musical comedies popular in England.

Coke experienced worse vicissitudes. Even the variety and richness of
a master mariner's vocabulary was taxed to its utmost resources when he
was coaxed into "trying on" a short jacket apparently intended for a
toreador. Such minor troubles, however, were overcome in time. A
razor and a hot bath were by no means the least important items of the
rejuvenating process, and when the two men entered the salon where Dom
Corria was holding an impromptu reception they looked like a couple of
coffee-planters from the Argentine. Schmidt was there already. For
some reason, the new President seemed to be so fond of the _Unser
Fritz's_ commander that he refused to be parted from him. It was not
until long afterward that Hozier discovered the reason of this mushroom
friendship. The German consul was in the room.

The appearance of Iris caused something akin to a sensation. The Dona
Pondillo could not create English clothes