house. _Auf_--Goot-py."

He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the
labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and
she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of
New York.

She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought
counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country.
It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing
her trunk.

CHAPTER II

Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to
Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same
effort. It was a wire Babel.

Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long
been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently
trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote,
telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all
the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the
funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and
administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all
the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.

Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept
pleading with Long Distance:

"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end
important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to
Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."

The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call
her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie
Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central
again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had
never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This
central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then
vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.

Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold
her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own
name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into
her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion
till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from
Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone
number and the message.

So glad you're on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and
see us