“I am wondering,” she answered frankly.  “You see, I have read about you in the papers, and I was terribly frightened when mother told me that I was to come.  Directly I saw you, you seemed quite a different person, and now again I am afraid.”

“Ah!” he sighed, “that terrible Press of ours!  They told you, I suppose, that I was hard, unscrupulous, unforgiving, a money-making machine, and all the rest of it.  Do you think that I look like that, Virginia?”

“I am very sure that you do not,” she answered.

“You will know me better, I hope, in a year or so’s time,” he said.  “If you wish to please me, there are two things which you have to remember, and which I expect from you.  One is absolute, implicit obedience, the other is absolute, unvarying truth.  You will never, I think, have cause to complain of me, if you remember those two things.”

“I will try,” she murmured.

Her thoughts suddenly flitted back to the poor little home from which she had come with such high hopes.  She thought of the excitement which had followed the coming of her uncle’s letter; the hopes that her harassed, overworked father had built upon it; the sudden, almost trembling joy which had come into her mother’s thin, faded face.  Her first taste of luxury suddenly brought before her eyes, stripped bare of everything except its pitiful cruelty, that ceaseless struggle for life in which it seemed to her that all of them had been engaged, year after year.  She shivered a little as she thought of them, shivered for fear she should fail now that the chance had come of some day being able to help them.  Absolute obedience, absolute truth!  If these two things were all, she could hold on, she was sure of it.

A messenger boy was brought in, and delivered a letter to her uncle.  He read and destroyed it at once.

“There is no answer,” he said.

The messenger protested.

“I am to wait, sir, until you give me one,” he said.  “The gentleman said it was most important.  I was to find you anywhere, anyhow, and get an answer of some sort.”

“How much,” Mr. Phineas Duge asked, “were you to receive if you took back an answer?”

“The gentleman promised me a dollar, sir,” the boy answered.

Mr. Duge put his hand into his pocket.

“Here are two dollars,” he said.  “Go away at once.  There is no answer.  There will not be one.  You can tell Mr. Hamilton that I said so.”

The boy departed.  Her uncle looked across at Virginia and smiled.  “That is how we have to buy immunity from small annoyances here,” he said.  “All the time it is the same thing—­dollars, dollars, dollars!  That messenger boy was clever to get in.  When we leave this restaurant, you will find that there are at least half a dozen people waiting to speak to me.  It will be telephoned to several places in the city that I am dining here to-night.  From where I am sitting, I can see two reporters standing by the entrance.  They are waiting for me.”