Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine thousand dollars.  He signed the new contract, inserting “The Smoke of Joy” in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper storiette.  And promptly as the United States mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.’s check for five thousand dollars.

“I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two o’clock,” Martin said, the morning the check arrived.  “Or, better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o’clock.  I’ll be looking out for you.”

At the appointed time she was there; but shoes was the only clew to the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office.  What happened thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream.  Fine gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying, “Well, Maria, you won’t have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month.”

Maria was too stunned for speech.

“Or next month, or the next, or the next,” her landlord said.

She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor.  And it was not until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.

“Why don’t you trade with me no more?” the Portuguese grocer asked Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car; and Martin explained that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house.  He noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.

“Maria,” Martin announced that night, “I’m going to leave you.  And you’re going to leave here yourself soon.  Then you can rent the house and be a landlord yourself.  You’ve a brother in San Leandro or Haywards, and he’s in the milk business.  I want you to send all your washing back unwashed—­understand?—­unwashed, and to go out to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother of yours.  Tell him to come to see me.  I’ll be stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland.  He’ll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one.”

And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to school.  Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.