"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