“You can’t go without the receipt for your securities.  How do you know I’m not stealing them from you?  What right would you have to claim them when you came again?  Sit down now and tell me something more about yourself.”

Half smiling, half tearfully, Diane complied.  Before the clerk returned she had given a brief outline of her life, agreeing in all but the tone of telling with much of what Mr. Grimston had stated half an hour earlier.

“It has been all my fault,” she declared, as the young man re-entered.  “There’s been nobody to blame but me.”

“I see that well enough,” the old man agreed, and once more she prepared to depart.

“Look at your receipt.  Compare it with the list there on the desk.”  Diane obeyed, though her eyes swam so that she could not tell one word from another.  “Is it all right?  Then so much the better.  You’ll find me at the same time to-morrow—­if you’re not late.”

“Since you won’t let me thank you, I must go without doing so,” she began, tremulously, “but I assure you—­”

“You needn’t assure me of anything, but just come again to-morrow.”

She smiled through the mist over her eyes, and bowed.

“I shall not be—­late,” was all she ventured to say, and turned to leave him.

She had reached the door, and half opened it, when she heard his voice behind her.

“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 poor.