"Nicky is here in England--safe after the sea voyage. Be a nize girl, and you shall see him soon now." CHAPTER IV The next morning Marie Louise, waking, found her windows opaque with fog. The gardens she usually looked over, glistening green all winter through, were gone, and in their place was a vast bale of sooty cotton packed so tight against the glass that her eyes could not pierce to the sill. Marie Louise went down to breakfast in a room like a smoky tunnel where the lights burned sickly. She was in a murky and suffocating humor, but Sir Joseph was strangely content for the hour and the air. He ate with the zest of a boy on a holi-morn, and beckoned her into his study, where he confided to her great news: "Nicky telephoned me. He brings wonderful news out of America. Big business he has done. He cannot come yet by our house, for even servants must not see him here. So you shall go and meet him. You take your own little car, and go most careful till you find Hyde Park gate. Inside you stop and get out to see if something is matter with the engine. A man is there--Nicky. He steps in the car. You get in and drive slowly--so slowly. Give him this letter--put in bosom of dress not to lose. He tells you maybe something, and he gives you envelope. Then he gets out, and you come home--but carefully. Don't let one of those buses run you over in the fog. I should not risk you if not most important." Marie Louise pleaded illness, and fear of never finding the place. But Sir Joseph stared at her with such wonder and pain that she yielded hastily, took the envelope, folded it small, thrust it into her chest pocket and went out to the garage, where she could hardly bully the chauffeur into letting her take her own car. He put all the curtains on, and she pushed forth into obfuscation like a one-man submarine. There was something of the effect of moving along the floor of the sea. The air was translucent, a little like water-depths, but everything was a blur. Luck was with her. She neither ran over nor was run over. But she was so tardy in finding the gate, and Nicky was so damp, so chilled, and so uneasy with the apparitions and the voices that had haunted him in the fog that he said nothing more cordial than: "At last! So you come!" He climbed in, shivering with cold or fear. And she ran the car a little farther into the nebulous depths. She gave him the letter from Sir Joseph and took from him another. Nicky did not care to tarry. "I should get back to my house with this devil's cold I've caught," he said. "Do you still have no sun in this bedamned England?" The "you" struck Marie Louise as odd coming from a professed Englishman, even if he did lay the blame for his accent on years spent in German banking-houses. "How did you find the United States?" Marie Louise asked, with a sudden qualm of homesickness. "Those United States! Ha! United about what? Money!"