ing from
them all the old privileges of freedom, the hopes of success in love
and business, and submitting to discipline, to tyranny, to vile
hardships. Wives and mothers were hurrying their men to the
slaughter; those who had no men to give or men too weak for the
trenches or unwilling to go were ashamed of themselves because they
were missing from the beadroll of contributors.

Mamise had become fanatic with the rest. She had wished to build
ships, and had been refused more than a stenographer's share in the
process. Next she had planned to go to the firing-line herself and
offer what gift she had--the poor little gift of entertaining the
soldiers with the vaudeville stunts she had lived down. And while she
waited for a passport to join the army of women in France, she found
at hand an opportunity to do a big deed, to thwart the enemy, to save
ships and all the lives that ships alone could save. The price would
be the liberty and what little good name her sister's husband had; it
would mean protests and tears from her poor sister, whom life had
dealt with harshly enough already.

But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy.
She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner
being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to
adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country.
Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both
by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she
could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at
the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade
in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it.

She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall
before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the
river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never
known.

She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her
lips, voicing the words:

"You owe me something, old capital. You'll never put up any statues to
me or carve my name on any tablets, but I'm doing something for you
that will mean more than anybody will ever realize."

She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily and
wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no
explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so.

Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to M