e had been told that the only way to get to Washington
was by the Highway Bridge from Alexandria, and this meant a detour of
miles. It gave Mamise her first and only grand rounds through Fort
Myer and the Arlington National Cemetery. She felt sorry for the
soldiers about the cold barracks, but she was in no mood to respond to
the marble pages of the Arlington epic.

The night before she had beheld in a clear vision the living hosts in
Flanders and France, but here under the snow lay sixteen thousand
dead, two thousand a hundred and eleven heroes under one monument of
eternal anonymity--dead from all our wars, and many of them with their
wives and daughters privileged to lie beside them.

But the mood is everything, and Mamise was too fretful to rise to this
occasion; and when her car had crept the uneasy miles and reached the
Alexandria bridge and crossed it, and wound through Potomac Park, past
the Washington Monument standing like a stupendous icicle, and reached
the hotel, she was just one hour late.

Davidge had given her up in disgust and despair, after vain efforts to
reach her at various other possible luncheon-places. He searched them
all on the chance that she might have misunderstood the rendezvous.
And Mamise spent a frantic hour trying to find him at some hotel. He
had registered nowhere, since a friend had put him up. The sole result
of this interesting game of two needles hunting each other through a
haystack was that Davidge went without lunch and Mamise ate alone.

In the late afternoon Davidge made another try. He finally got Polly
Widdicombe on the telephone and asked for Mamise. Polly expressed her
amazement.

"Why, she just telephoned that she was staying in town to dine with
you and go to the theater."

"Oh!" said the befuddled Davidge. "Oh, of course! Silly of me!
Good-by!"

Now he was indeed in a mental mess. Besides, he had another engagement
to dinner. He spent a long, exasperating hour in a telephone-chase
after his host, told a poor lie to explain the necessity for breaking
the engagement, and spent the rest of the evening hunting Mamise in
vain.

When he took the train for his shipyard at last he was in a hopeless
confusion between rage at Mamise and fear that some mishap had
befallen her. It would have been hard to tell whether he loved her or
hated her the more.

But she, after giving up the pursuit of him, had taken up an inquiry
into the trains to Baltimore. The time was now t