ursues who flees it, but she prayed that the rule
would be proved by an exception to-night, and that she might sneak out
as anonymously as she had sneaked in.

Nicky Easton was a more immediate problem. He was groping for her
hands. When he found them she was glad that she had her gloves on.
They were chaperoned, too, as it were, by their heavy wraps. She was
fairly lost in her furs and he in a burly overcoat, so that when in a
kind of frenzy he thrust one cumbrous arm about her the insulation was
complete. He might as well have been embracing the cab she was in.

But the insolence of the intention enraged her, and she struggled
against him as a she-bear might rebuff a too familiar bruin--buffeted
his arms away and muttered:

"You imbecile! Do you want me to knock on the glass and tell the
driver to let me out?"

"_Nein doch_!"

"Then let me alone or I will."

Nicky sighed abysmally and sank back. He said nothing at all to her,
and she said the same to him while long strips of Baltimorean marble
stoops went by. They turned into Charles Street and climbed past its
statue-haunted gardens and on out to the north.

They were almost at Druid Hill Park before Mamise realized that she
was wasting her time and her trip for nothing. She spoke angrily:

"You said you wanted to see me. I'm here."

Nicky fidgeted and sulked:

"I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is
no use."

"If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have
stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something."

"I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk."

Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could
not imagine how to coax him out of silence.

His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:

"_Ach Gott_, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These
Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my _Vaterland_.
But the time comes soon, and I must make patience. _Eile mit Weile!_"

"You'd better tell me what's on your mind," Mamise suggested, but he
shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom
rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized
that she could not extort Nicky's secret from him by asserting her own
dignity.

She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly
schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She
hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind,