“Anyone could see you were only pretending.  It made me angry, when I thought of it afterwards.”

“I just had to do it—­I wanted to talk to you.  But listen to what I’m going to tell you!  It’s a miracle, all right,—­happening just at that time—­that very morning.  I was coming back to Boston from New York on the midnight, and when the train ran into Back Bay and I was putting on my trousers the piece rolled out among the bed clothes.  I didn’t know I’d lost it until I sat down in the Parker House to eat my breakfast, and I suddenly felt in my pocket.  It made me sick to think it was gone.  Well, I started to telephone the Pullman office, and then I made up my mind I’d take a taxi and go down to the South Station myself, and just as I got out of the cab there was the nigger porter, all dressed up in his glad rags, coming out of the station!  I knew him, I’d been on his car lots of times. `Say, George,’ I said, `I didn’t forget you this morning, did I?’

“`No, suh,’ said George, ‘you done give me a quarter.’

“`I guess you’re mistaken, George,’ says I, and I fished out a ten dollar bill.  You ought to have seen that nigger’s eyes.”

“`What’s this for, Mister Ditmar?’ says he.

“`For that lucky gold piece you found in lower seven,’ I told him. `We’ll trade.’

“‘Was you in lower seven?—­so you was!’ says George.  Well, he had it all right—­you bet he had it.  Now wasn’t that queer?  The very day you and I began to know each other!”

“Wonderful!” Janet agreed.  “Why don’t you put it on your watch chain?”

“Well, I’ve thought of that,” he replied, with the air of having considered all sides of the matter.  “But I’ve got that charm of the secret order I belong to—­that’s on my chain.  I guess I’ll keep it in my vest pocket.”

“I didn’t know you were so superstitious,” she mocked.

“Pretty nearly everybody’s superstitious,” he declared.  And she thought of Lise.

“I’m not.  I believe if things are going to happen well, they’re going to happen.  Nothing can prevent it.”

“By thunder” he exclaimed, struck by her remark.  “You are like that You’re different from any person I ever knew....”

From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar.  He spoke of a large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago, where he intended to take her.  In the future he would never travel alone.  And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was.  He gloried in her innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his cosmopolitanism.  In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he imagined, but her eyes shone.  She had never even been in a sleeping car!  For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one’s disposal.