But Mamise counted the cost as nothing compared to what it would buy. She dared not laugh aloud in the crowded chair-car, but her inner being was shaken with joy. She had learned to love Davidge and to adore that strange, shapeless idea that she called her country. Instead of sacrificing her lover to her people, she could serve both by the same deed. She was wildly impatient for the moment when she could lay before Davidge the splendid information she had secured at the expense of a few negligible lies. If they should cost her a decade in purgatorial torments, she would feel that they were worth it. She reached Washington at a little after eleven and Grinden Hall before midnight. Now as she stood on the portico and looked across the river at the night-lit city, she felt such a pride as she had never known. She waved a salutation to the wraith of a town, her mind, if not her lips, voicing the words: "You owe me something, old capital. You'll never put up any statues to me or carve my name on any tablets, but I'm doing something for you that will mean more than anybody will ever realize." She turned and found the black maid gaping at her sleepily and wondering what invisible lover she was waving at. Mamise made no explanation, but went in, feeling a trifle foolish, but divinely so. Polly got out of bed and came all bundled up to Mamise's room to demand an accounting. "I was just on the point of telephoning the police to see if you had been found in the river." Mamise did not bother either to explain her past lies or tell any new ones. She majestically answered: "Polly darling, I have been engaged in affairs of state, which I am not at liberty to divulge to the common public." "Rot!" said Polly. "I believe the 'affairs,' but not the 'state.'" Mamise was above insult. "Some day you will know. You've heard of Helen of Troy, the lady with the face that launched a thousand ships? Well, this face of mine will launch at least half a dozen freight-boats." Polly yawned. "I'll call my doctor in the morning and have you taken away quietly. Your mind's wandering, as well as the rest of you." Mamise chuckled like a child with a great secret, and Polly waddled back to her bed. Next morning Mamise woke into a world warm with her own importance, though the thermometer was farther down than Washington's oldest records. She called Davidge on the long-distance telephone, and there was a zero in his voice that she had never heard before. "This is Mamise," she sang. "Yes?" Simply that and nothing more. She laughed aloud, glad that he cared enough for her to be so angry at her. She forgot the decencies of telephone etiquette enough to sing out: "Do you really love me so madly?" He loathed sentimentalities over the telephone, and she knew it, and was always indulging in them. But the fat was on the wire now, and he came back at her with a still icier tone: "There's only one good excuse for what you've done. Are you telephoning from a hospital?"