She wiped her hand on her apron and took it, then handed it back to him, saying: "You'll have to read it. I ain't my specs." Davidge said, "Please ask Miss Webling if she can see Mr. Davidge." "You're not Mr. Davidge!" Abbie gasped, remembering the importance Marie Louise gave him. "Yes," said Davidge, with proper modesty. "Well, I want to know!" Abbie wiped her hand again and thrust it forward, seizing his questioning fingers in a practised clench, and saying, "Come right on in and seddown." She haled the befuddled Davidge to a chair and regarded him with beaming eyes. He regarded her with the eyes of astonishment--and the ears, too, for the amazing servant, forever wiping her hands, went to the stairs and shrieked: "Mamee-eese! Oh, Ma-mee-uz! Mist' Davidge is shere." Poor Mamise! She had to come down upon such a scene, and without having had any chance to break the news that she had a sister she had to introduce the sister. She had no chance to explain her till a fortunate whiff of burning pastry led Abbie to groan, "My Lord, them pies!" and flee. If ever Marie Louise had been guilty of snobbery, she was doing penance for it now. She was too loyal to what her family ought to have been and was not to apologize for Abbie, but she suffered in a social purgatory. Worse yet, she had to ask Davidge to give her brother-in-law a job. And Davidge said he would. He said it before he saw Jake. And when he saw him, though he did not like him, he did not guess what treachery the fellow planned. He invited him to come to the shipyard--by train. He invited Mamise to ride thither in her own car the next day to see his laboratory for ships, never dreaming that the German menace was already planning its destruction. * * * * * Not only in cheap plays and farces do people continue in perplexities that one question and one answer would put an end to. In real life we incessantly dread to ask the answers to conundrums that we cannot solve, and persist in misery for lack of a little frankness. For many a smiling mile, on the morrow, Davidge rode in a torment. So stout a man, to be fretted by so little a matter! Yet he was unable to bring himself to the point of solving his curiosity. The car had covered forty miles, perhaps, while his thoughts ran back and forth, lacing the road like a dog accompanying a carriage. A mental speedometer would have run up a hundred miles before he made the plunge and popped the subject. "Mamise is an unusual name," he remarked. Marie Louise was pleasantly startled by the realization that his long silence had been devoted to her. "Like it?" she asked. "You bet." The youthfulness of this embarrassed him and made her laugh. He grew solemn for about eleven hundred yards of road that went up and down and up and down in huge billows. Then he broke out again: "It's an unusual name." She laughed patiently. "So I've heard." The road shot up a swirling hill into an old, cool grove.