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Peebleby laughed. “You’ve been very decent about it, too. I hope to see something of you in the future. What?”

“You’ll see my smoke, that’s all.”

“You’re not going back right away?”

“To-morrow; I’ve booked my passage and cabled the girl to meet me in New York.”

“My word! A girl! She’ll be glad to hear of your success.”

“Oh, I’ve told her already. You see, I knew I’d won.”

The Director General of the Robinson-Ray Syndicate stared in open amazement, but Mitchell hitched his chair closer, saying:

“Now let’s get at those signatures. I’ve got to pack.”

That night Louis Mitchell slept with fifteen separate contracts under his pillow. He double-locked the door, pulled the dresser in front of it, and left the light burning. At times he awoke with a start and felt for the documents. Toward morning he was seized with a sudden fright, so he got up and read them all over for fear somebody had tampered with them. They were correct, however, whereupon he read them a second time just for pleasure. They were strangely interesting.

On the Deutschland he slept much of the way across, and by the time Liberty Statue loomed up he could dream of other things than blue-prints–of the girl, for instance.

She had enough left from the eighty dollars to bring her to New York and to pay for a week’s lodging in West Thirty-fourth Street, though how she managed it Mitchell never knew. She was at the dock, of course. He knew she would be. He expected to see her with her arms outstretched and with the old joyous smile upon her dimpled face, and, therefore, he was sorely disappointed when he came down the gang-plank and she did not appear. He searched high and low until finally he discovered her seated over by the letter “M,” where his trunk was waiting inspection. There she was, huddled up on a coil of rope, crying as if her heart would break; her nerve was gone, along with the four twenty-dollar bills; she was afraid to face him, afraid there had been an error in his cablegram.

Not until she lay in his arms at last, sobbing and laughing, her slender body all aquiver, did she believe. Then he allowed her to feel the fifteen contracts inside his coat. Later, when they were in a cab bound for her smelly little boarding-house, he showed them to her. In return she gave him a telegram from his firm–a telegram addressed as follows:

Mr. LOUIS MITCHELL,

General Sales Manager, Comer & Mathison, New York City.

The message read:

That goes. COMER.

Mitchell opened the trap above his head and called up to the driver: “Hey, Cabbie! We’ve changed our minds. Drive us to the Waldorf–at a gallop.”