d, a poor thing, but his own.
His mind was like a mold-loft full of designs and detail-drawings to
scale, blue-prints and models. On the way a ship was growing for him.
As yet she was a ghastly thing all ribs, like the skeleton of some
ancient sea-monster left ashore at high tide and perished eons back,
leaving only the bones.

His fancy saw her transverses taking on their iron flesh. He saw the
day of her nativity. He heard them knock out the blocks that lowered
the sliding-ways to the groundways and sent her swirling into the
sea.

He saw her ready for her cargo, saw a Niagara of wheat cascading into
her hold. He saw her go forth into the sea.

Then he saw the ship stagger, a wound opened in her side, from the
bullet of a submarine.

It was all so vivid that he spoke aloud in a frenzy of ire:

"If the Germans kill my ship I'll kill a German! By God, I will!"

He was startled by the sound of his own voice, and he begged her
pardon humbly.

She had been away in reverie, too. The word "submarine" had sent her
back into her haunting remembrances of the _Lusitania_ and of her own
helpless entanglement in the fate of other ships--their names as
unknown to her as the names and faces of the men that died with them,
or perished of starvation and thirst in the lifeboats sent adrift. The
thought of these poor anonymities frightened her. She shuddered with
such violence that Davidge was startled from his own wrath.

"You're having a chill," he said. "I wish you would take my coat. You
don't want to get sick."

She shook her head and chattered, "No, no."

"Then you'd better get out and walk up and down this bridge awhile.
There's not even a lap-robe here."

"I should like to walk, I think."

She stepped out, aided by his hand, a strong hand, and warm about her
icy fingers. Her knees were weak, and he set her elbow in the hollow
of his arm and guided her. They walked like the blind leading the
blind through a sea of pitch. The only glimmer was the little
scratches of light pinked in the dead sky by a few stars.

"'It's beautiful overhead, if you're going that way,'" Davidge
quoted.

He set out briskly, but Marie Louise hung back timidly.

"Not so fast! I can't see a thing."

"That's the best time to keep moving."

"But aren't you afraid to push on when you can't see where you're
going?" she demanded.

"Who can ever tell where he's going? The sunlight is no guaranty.
We're all bats in the daytime and not cat