engagement with Lady Clifton-Wyatt? Why so much
German association?"

He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of
them so wild as the truth--that Marie Louise was cowering under the
accusation of being a German agent.

He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the
employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his
hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his
riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then
thinking of ships and not of him.

That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of
Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the
family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered
the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of
novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They
were the very latest romance to her now.

The authors of _An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the
Compass in Iron Ships_, _The Marine Steam-engine_, and _An Outline
of Ship-building_, _Theoretical and Practical_, could hardly have
dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace
of a young woman's arms. The books would have struck a naval architect
as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of
news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand
with ease was Captain Samuels's _From the Forecastle to the
Cabin_, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his
youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper
_Dreadnaught_, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of
American marine glory.

She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and
dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another
book, Bowditch's _American Navigation_. It was the "Revised Edition of
1883," but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the
reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her
shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.

CHAPTER IX

Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their
cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off
the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the
alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists
to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none
st