“You can help me if you like,” she said. “I don’t know how steady I’m going to be on my pins after what I’ve been through.”

“We’ll see you downstairs then,” I said. Daniel nodded and closed the door behind him.

“He’s awfully charming for a policeman, isn’t he?” she said as she stood up. “Good looking too.”

“Not bad, I suppose,” I agreed. “Now what will you be wearing, do you think? It’s a hot day out there again.”

“That’s one of the things I liked about England,” she said. “It was never too hot. I liked England a lot better than Germany but there’s no place like home, is there?”

I wondered if she’d also seen that new play The Wizard of Oz where that line featured prominently, and smiled to myself.

It took a while to lace her into her corsets, given that I wasn’t used to the process myself, and then to fix her hair to her satisfaction, but Daniel greeted us with no sign of impatience as he assisted Bess into the front seat of the automobile beside him and then me into the back.

“Hold on to your hats, ladies,” he said and we set off at a great rate.

“I’d like to get some details straight before we reach the theater,” he said over the pop-popping of the motor. “You’ve been away from America for a while, I gather.”

“Three years,” she said. “Most of it in England and Germany, but we were also in Hungary and Harry went to Russia too. I stayed behind that time. Harry thought that Russia might be a dangerous place for me.”

“Why so long away?”

“The money,” she said. “They treat Harry like a king over there. He gets paid enormous sums to appear in the theaters and sometimes he is invited to perform for royalty and nobility too. The Tsar of Russia was so taken with him he wanted him to stay on as his adviser. And the Kaiser gave him a gold watch. We only came home this summer because Harry worries about his mother, and I hadn’t been well and was homesick. But we’re booked to sail back to Europe in a couple of weeks from now.”

We paused to let a horse-drawn jitney cross in front of us. The driver glared as if we were a menace. Little boys ran over to examine our contraption.

“What makes it go, mister?” one of them asked.

“Magic!” Daniel called as the coast cleared and we moved off.

“And I understand that last night wasn’t the first occasion that something unpleasant has happened to you during this visit?” Daniel continued.