It did not surprise me to hear myself laughing at the words which, when she spoke them, had seemed so terrible. It was as though none of it had ever occurred. It was part of a romantic play, and we had seen the play together. Who could believe that the young man, tramping the streets on the lookout for a job, had ever signed his name, as vice-president of Honduras, to a passport for Joseph Fiske; that the beautiful girl in the sables, with her card-case in her hand, had ever heard the shriek of shrapnel?
And she exclaimed, just as though we had both been thinking aloud: “No, it’s not possible, is it?”
“It never happened,” I said.
“But I tell you what has happened,” she went on, eagerly, “or perhaps you know. Have you heard what my father did?”
I said I had not. I refrained from adding that I believed her father capable of doing almost anything.
“Then I’m the first to tell you the news,” she exclaimed. She nodded at me energetically. “Well, he’s paid that money. He owed it all the time.’
“That’s not news,” I said.
She flushed a little, and laughed.
“But, indeed, father was not to blame,” she exclaimed. “They deceived him dreadfully. But when we got home, he looked it up, and found you were right about that money, and so he’s paid it back, not to that odious Alvarez man, but in some way, I don’t quite understand how, but so the poor people will get it.”
“Good!” I cried.