d by higher crags. The glory that lights it is
glory in distant eyes alone.

So for poor Mamise. She had run away from a squalid home to the
gorgeous freedom of stage-life, only to find that the stage also is
squalid and slavish, and that the will-o'-the-wisp of gorgeous freedom
had jumped back to home life. She left the cheap theaters for the
expensive luxury of Sir Joseph's mansion. But that had its squalors
and slaveries, too. She had fled from troubled England to joyous
America, only to find in America a thousand distresses.

Then her eyes had been caught with the glitter of true freedom. She
would be a builder of ships--cast off the restraint of womanhood and
be a magnificent builder of ships! And now she was finding that this
dream was also a nightmare.

Everywhere she looked was dismay, futility, failure. The hot wave
found her an easy victim. A frightened servant who did not know the
difference between sunstroke and heat prostration nearly killed her
before a doctor came.

The doctor sent Marie Louise to bed, and in bed she stayed. It was her
trained nurse who wrote a letter to Mr. Davidge regretting that she
could not come to the launching of the _Clara_. Abbie was not present,
either. She came up to be with Marie Louise. This was not the least of
Marie Louise's woes.

She was quite childish about missing the great event. She wept because
another hand swung the netted champagne-bottle against the bow as it
lurched down the toboggan-slide.

Davidge wrote her about the launching, but it was a business man's
letter, with the poetry all smothered. He told her that there had
been an accident or two, and nearly a disaster--an unexploded
infernal-machine had been found. A scheme to wreck the launching-ways
had been detected on the final inspection.

Marie Louise read the letter aloud to Abbie, and, even though she knew
the ship was safe, trembled as if it were still in jeopardy. Her
shaken faith in humanity was still capable of feeling bewilderment at
the extremes of German savagery. She cried out to her sister:

"How on earth can anybody be fiendish enough to have tried to destroy
that ship even before it was launched? How could a German spy have got
into the yard?"

"It didn't have to have been a German," said Abbie, bitterly.

"Who else would have wanted to play such a dastardly trick? No
American would!"

"Well, it depends on what you call Amurrican," said Abbie. "There's
some them Independent workm