dy Clifton-Wyatt had declared herself openly hostile to
Marie Louise, and would get her sooner or later. Flight from
Washington would be the only safety.

But Marie Louise did not want to leave Washington. She loved
Washington and the opportunities it offered a woman to do important
work in the cosmopolitan whirl of its populace. But she could not live
on at Polly Widdicombe's forever.

Marie Louise decided that her hour had struck. She must find a nook of
her own. And she would have to live in it all by herself. Who was
there to live with? She felt horribly deserted in life. She had looked
at numerous houses and apartments from time to time. Apartments were
costlier and fewer than houses. Since she was doomed to live alone,
anyway, she might as well have a house. Her neighbors would more
easily be kept aloof.

She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as
affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places
she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places
that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented
yesterday.

Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr.
Hailstorks:

"Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it
if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for
a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is
getting to be quite a bore.'"

"Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly.

He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely
furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs,
rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have
achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does,
what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things
to live among, and what excuse they had had for them.

Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear
of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard,
Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The
house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream
ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession
of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill
superbly built up above the silver Thames.

"Whatever is all that?" she cried.

"Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere
real-estately affection f