, obliterating my own small
self, exploring this feeling of hers for him and his dream of a future
harbor.

Soon she was doing all the talking, her voice growing lower and more
intense as she tried to make me feel all he meant when he said, "It's
going to be the first port in the world." She told how up in his tower
he made you see the commerce of this whole mighty world of peace
converging slowly on this port. She told of the night two years before
when he had come home "all shaken and queer" and had said to her
huskily, "Eleanore, child, at last it's sure. There's to be a Panama
Canal." Of other nights when he didn't come home and at last she went
down to his office to fetch him and found him at midnight there with his
men, "all working like mad and gay as larks!"

"When it comes to millions of dollars for his work," she said, "he's so
very keen that he makes you feel like a little child. But when it's
merely a question of dollars for himself to live on, he's a perfect
baby. He won't look at a bill, he always turns them over to me. He won't
enter a shop, he won't go to a tailor. One ready-made clothing store has
his measure and twice a year I order his clothes and then have a fight
to get him to wear them. He never knows what he eats except steak. One
night when we had been having steak six evenings in succession I tried
chicken for a change. At first he didn't know what was wrong. Every now
and then he would seem to notice something. 'What's the matter with me?'
I could see he was asking. Then all at once he had it. 'My dear,' he
said, very coaxingly, 'could we have a nice juicy porterhouse steak for
supper to-morrow evening?'"

From these and many other details slowly I got the feel of my man.
Closer, more intimate he grew. All the work I had done in Paris,
questioning, drawing out my friends until I could feel their inner
selves coming out of them into me, was counting now. I had never done so
well before, I was sliding my questions in just right, very cautiously
turning her memory this way and that on her father's life, watching her
grow more and more unaware of my presence beside her, although now I had
her bending toward me, eagerly, close.

"And she thinks she's doing it all by herself," I thought exultingly.

But as there came a pause in our talk, she turned slightly in her seat
and glanced in through the window into the lighted room behind. And
instantly her expression changed. A swift look of surprise,