She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the car she had bought for her Motor Corps work.

He said what she hoped he would say:

"I didn't know you drove so well."

She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.'

Hop in, and I'll show you."

He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth Street, fast and far.

She was amazed at her own audacity, and Davidge could not make her out. She had a scared look that puzzled him. She was really thinking that she was the most unconscionable kidnapper that ever ran off with some other body's child. He could hardly dun her for the money, and she had apparently forgotten it again.

They were well to the north when she said:

"Do you know Rock Creek Park?"

"No, I've never been in it."

"Would you like a glimpse? I think it's the prettiest park in the world."

She looked at her watch with that twist of the wrist now becoming almost universal and gasped:

"Oh, dear! I must turn back. But it's just about as short to go through the park. I mustn't make you late to Lady Clifton-Wyatt's tea."

He could find absolutely nothing to say to that except, "It's mighty pretty along here." She turned into Blagdon Road and coasted down the long, many-turning dark glade. At the end she failed to steer to the south. The creek itself crossed the road. She drove the car straight through its lilting waters. There was exhilaration in the splashing charge across the ford. Then the road wound along the bank, curling and writhing with it gracefully through thick forests, over bridges and once more right through the bright flood. The creek scrambling among its piled-up boulders was too gay to suggest any amorous mood, and Marie Louise did not quite dare to drive the car down to the water's edge at any of the little green plateaus where picnics were being celebrated on the gra.s.s.

"I always lose my way in this park," she said. "I expect I'm lost now."

She began to regret Davidge's approaching absence, with a strange loneliness. He was becoming tenderly necessary to her. She sighed, hardly meaning to speak aloud, "Too bad you're going away so soon."

He was startled to find that his departure meant something to her. He spoke with an affectionate rea.s.surance.

She stopped the car on a lofty plateau where several ladies and gentlemen were exercising their horses at hurdle-jumping. The elan of rush, plunge and recovery could not excite Mamise now.

"I'll tell you what we'll do. The next time I come to Washington you drive me over to my shipyard and I'll show you the new boat and the new yard for the rest of the flock."

"That would be glorious. I should like to know something about ships."

"I can teach you all I know in a little while."

"You know all there is to know, don't you?"

"Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old methods, but they're all done away with. The fabricated ship is an absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know.

Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pa.s.s it along to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.

"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard.

Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom."

He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided with a slump.

"What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!"

She rose at that. "The day has pa.s.sed when a man can apologize for talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know, and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up."

"Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel.

He apologized again for his roughness.

"I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said.

As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six.

"Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once."

"Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I hadn't."

They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering the sweet sorrow of parting.

The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise.

Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that is also there.

Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and love began to blaze within him.

He felt his first impulse to throw an arm about her and draw her to his breast, but though the solitude was complete and the opportunity perfect, he saw that she was in no spirit for dalliance. There is no colder chaperon for a woman than a new ambition to accomplish something worth while.

As they drew up at the New Willard she was saying:

"Telephone the minute you come to town again. Good-by. I'm late to dinner."

She meant that she was late to life, late to a career.

Davidge stared at her in wonderment as she bent to throw the lever into first speed. She roughed it in her impatience, and the growl of the gear drowned the sound of another man's voice calling her name.

This man ran toward her, but she did not notice him and got away before he could overtake her.

Davidge was jostled by him as he ran, and noted that he called Miss Webling "Mees Vapelink." The Teutonic intonation did not fall pleasantly on the American ear at that time. Washington was a forbidden city to Germanic men and soon would banish the enemy women, too.

The stranger took refuge on the sidewalk, and his curses were snarly with the Teutonic _r_. Davidge studied him and began to remember him.

He had seen him with Marie Louise somewhere. Suddenly his mind, ransacking the filing-cabinet of his memory, turned up a picture of Nicky Easton at the side of Marie Louise at the dinner in Sir Joseph's home. He could not remember the name, but a man has a ready label for anybody he hates.

He began to worry now. Who was this spick foreigner who ran hooting after her? It was not like Davidge to be either curious or suspicious.

But love was beginning its usual hocus-pocus with character and turning a tired business man into a restless swain.

Davidge resented Easton's claim on Marie Louise, whatever it was, as an invasion of some imagined property right of his own, or at least of some option he had secured somehow. He was alarmed at the Teutonic accent of the interloper. He began to take heed of how little he knew of Marie Louise, after all. He recalled Sir Joseph Webling's German accent. An icy fear chilled him.

His important business parley was conducted with an absent-mindedness that puzzled his host, the eminent iron-master, Jacob Cruit, who had exchanged an income of a million a year and dictatorial powers for a governmental wage of one dollar per annum, no authority, no grat.i.tude, and endless trouble.

Davidge's head was buzzing with thoughts in which Cruit had no part: