ady Clifton-Wyatt answered: "I did. But I don't!"

Then she turned and moved toward the dining-room door.

The head waiter bowed with deference and command and beckoned Lady
Clifton-Wyatt. She obeyed him with meek hauteur.

CHAPTER II

As she came out of the first hotel of her selection and rejection
Marie Louise asked the car-starter the name of another. He mentioned
the New Willard.

It was not far, and she was there before she had time to recover from
the staggering effect of Lady Clifton-Wyatt's bludgeon-like snub. As
timidly as the waif and estray that she was, she ventured into the
crowded, gorgeous lobby with its lofty and ornate ceiling on its big
columns. At one side a long corridor ran brokenly up a steep hill. It
was populous with loungers who had just finished their dinners or were
waiting for a chance to get into the dining-rooms. Orchestra music was
lilting down the aisle.

When Marie Louise had threaded the crowd and reached the desk a very
polite and eager clerk asked her if she had a reservation. He seemed
to be as regretful as she when she said no. He sighed, "We've turned
away a hundred people in the last two hours."

She accepted her dismissal dumbly, then paused to ask, "I say, do you
by any chance know where Grinden Hall is?"

He shook his head and turned to another clerk to ask, "Do you know of
a hotel here named Grinden Hall?"

The other shook his head, too. There was a vast amount of head-shaking
going on everywhere in Washington. He added, "I'm new here." Nearly
everybody seemed to be new here. It seemed as if the entire populace
had moved into a ready-made town.

Marie Louise had barely the strength to explain, "Grinden Hall is not
an hotel; it is a home, in Rosslyn, wherever that is."

"Oh, Rosslyn--that's across the river in Virginia."

"Do you know, by any chance, Major Thomas Widdicombe?"

He shook his head. Major Widdicombe was a big man, but the town was
fairly swarming with men bigger than he. There were shoals of
magnates, but giants in their own communities were petty nuisances
here pleading with room-clerks for cots and with head waiters for
bread. The lobby was a thicket of prominent men set about like trees.
Several of them had the Congressional look. Later history would record
them as the historic statesmen of titanic debates, men by whose
eloquence and leadership and committee-room toil the Republic would be
revolutionized in nearly every detail, and billi