"Now let's think of something else, if you don't mind." They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of her and his second. In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached the town where his shipyard lay. CHAPTER II From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess of land and riverscape--a large steel shed, a bewilderment of scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty water. A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the neighborhood were numbers of workmen's huts--some finished, and long rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of raw biscuits. She saw it all as it was, with a stranger's eyes. Davidge saw it with the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly accepting future possibilities as realities. Davidge said, with repressed pride: "Well, thar she blows!" "What?" "My shipyard!" This with depressed pride. "Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!" This with forced enthusiasm. "You don't like it," he groaned. "I'm crazy about it." "If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and weeds and mud-holes and sluices you'd appreciate what we've reclaimed and the work that has been done." The motor pitched down a badly bruised road. "Where's the ship that's nearly done--your mother's ship?" "Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding." "Don't tell me there's a ship in there!" "Yep, and she's just bursting to come out." They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if a bottle of beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough to blow off the froth would blow him over. Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the ship that Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did not believe Marie Louise ready to understand it. "Let's begin at the beginning," he said. "See those railroad tracks over there? Well, that's where the timber comes from the forests and the steel from the mills. Now we'll see what happens to 'em in the shop." He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it across the long room like a captured beetle.