“Pads?”

“Yes—­things to fat up her spindles with so as to be plump and attractive.  Well, she got burnt out in a hotel and lost $30,000 worth of diamonds.”

“She?  Where’d she get them?”

“Goodness knows—­given to her, no doubt, by spoony young flats and sappy old bald-heads in the front row.  All the papers were full of it.  She struck for higher pay and got it.  Well, she got burnt out again and lost all her diamonds, and it gave her such a lift that she went starring.”

“Well, if hotel fires are all she’s got to depend on to keep up her name, it’s a pretty precarious kind of a reputation I should think.”

“Not with her.  No, anything but that.  Because she’s so lucky; born lucky, I reckon.  Every time there’s a hotel fire she’s in it.  She’s always there—­and if she can’t be there herself, her diamonds are.  Now you can’t make anything out of that but just sheer luck.”

“I never heard of such a thing.  She must have lost quarts of diamonds.”

“Quarts, she’s lost bushels of them.  It’s got so that the hotels are superstitious about her.  They won’t let her in.  They think there will be a fire; and besides, if she’s there it cancels the insurance.  She’s been waning a little lately, but this fire will set her up.  She lost $60,000 worth last night.”

“I think she’s a fool.  If I had $60,000 worth of diamonds I wouldn’t trust them in a hotel.”

“I wouldn’t either; but you can’t teach an actress that.  This one’s been burnt out thirty-five times.  And yet if there’s a hotel fire in San Francisco to-night she’s got to bleed again, you mark my words.  Perfect ass; they say she’s got diamonds in every hotel in the country.”

When they arrived at the scene of the fire the poor old earl took one glimpse at the melancholy morgue and turned away his face overcome by the spectacle.  He said: 

“It is too true, Hawkins—­recognition is impossible, not one of the five could be identified by its nearest friend.  You make the selection, I can’t bear it.”

“Which one had I better—­”

“Oh, take any of them.  Pick out the best one.”

However, the officers assured the earl—­for they knew him, everybody in Washington knew him—­that the position in which these bodies were found made it impossible that any one of them could be that of his noble young kinsman.  They pointed out the spot where, if the newspaper account was correct, he must have sunk down to destruction; and at a wide distance from this spot they showed him where the young man must have gone down in case he was suffocated in his room; and they showed him still a third place, quite remote, where he might possibly have found his death if perchance he tried to escape by the side exit toward the rear.  The old Colonel brushed away a tear and said to Hawkins: 

“As it turns out there was something prophetic in my fears.  Yes, it’s a matter of ashes.  Will you kindly step to a grocery and fetch a couple more baskets?”