ar, I'm an ungrateful woman! I suppose your turn
will come next, Mark, and then I don't know what I will do!"

CHAPTER IV

But Margaret's turn did not come for nearly a year. Then--in Germany
again, and lingering at a great Berlin hotel because the spring was so
beautiful, and the city so sweet with linden bloom, and especially
because there were two Americans at the hotel whose game of bridge it
pleased Mr. and Mrs. Carr-Boldt daily to hope they could match,--then
Margaret was transformed within a few hours from a merely pretty, very
dignified, perfectly contented secretary, entirely satisfied with what
she wore as long as it was suitable and fresh, into a living woman,
whose cheeks paled and flushed at nothing but her thoughts, who
laughed at herself in her mirror, loitered over her toilet trying one
gown after another, and walked half-smiling through a succession of
rosy dreams.

It all came about very simply. One of the aforementioned bridge
players wondered if Mrs. Carr-Bolt and her niece--oh, wasn't it?--her
secretary then,--would like to hear a very interesting young American
professor lecture this morning?--wondered, when they were fanning
themselves in the airy lecture-room, if they would care to meet
Professor Tension?

Margaret looked into a pair of keen, humorous eyes, answered with her
own smile Professor Tension's sudden charming one, lost her small hand
in his big firm one. Then she listened to him talk, as he strode about
the platform, boyishly shaking back the hair that fell across his
forehead. After that he walked to the hotel with them, through
dazzling seas of perfume, and of flowers, under the enchanted shifting
green of great trees,--or so Margaret thought. There was a plunge from
the hot street into the awning cool gloom of the hotel, and then a
luncheon, when the happy steady murmur from their own table seemed
echoed by the murmurs clink and stir and laughter all about them,
and accented by the not-too-close music from the band.

Doctor Tension was everything charming, Margaret thought, instantly
drawn by the unaffected, friendly manner, and watching the interested
gleam of his blue eyes and the white flash of his teeth He was a
gentleman, to begin with; distinguished at thirty-two in his chosen
work; big and well-built, without suggesting the athlete, of an old
and honored American family, and the only son of a rich--and
eccentric--old doctor whom Mrs. Carr-Bolt chanced to know.

He