iddle Ages and nowadays, and there'll be all kinds
forever. But we're wrangling like a pair of lovers instead of getting
along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances."

"Aren't we going to be more than that?"

"I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I'm not asking for a job
as your wife."

"You can have it."

"Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the
world and can support you in the style you're accustomed to, I may
come and ask for your hand."

Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew
more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has
some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did
not often argue abstrusely, and she was already fagged out mentally.
She broke off the debate.

"Now let's think of something else, if you don't mind."

They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in
alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite
of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him
in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between
his first sight of her and his second.

In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of
mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still
pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached
the town where his shipyard lay.

CHAPTER II

From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess
of land and riverscape--a large steel shed, a bewilderment of
scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that
were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of
machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty
water.

A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the
neighborhood were numbers of workmen's huts--some finished, and long
rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of
raw biscuits.

She saw it all as it was, with a stranger's eyes. Davidge saw it with
the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly
accepting future possibilities as realities.

Davidge said, with repressed pride:

"Well, thar she blows!"

"What?"

"My shipyard!" This with depressed pride.

"Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!" This with forced enthusiasm.

"You don't like it," he groaned.

"I'm crazy about it."

"If you co