Nicky Easton appeared out of her list of the buried. She gasped at sight of him. "I thought you were dead." He laughed: "If I am it, thees is my _Doppelgänger_." And he began to hum with a grisly smile Schubert's setting to Heine's poem of the man who met his own ghost and double, aping his love-sorrow outside the home of his dead sweetheart: "_Der Mond zeigt mir meine eig'ne Gestalt. Du Doppelgänger, du bleicher Geselle! Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid, Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle So manche Nacht in alter Zeit._" Marie Louise was terrified by the harrowing emotions the song always roused in her, but more by the dreadful sensation of walking that crowded Avenue with a man humming German at her side. "Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name!" she pleaded. He laughed Teutonically, and asked her to lunch with him. "I have another engagement, and I am late," she said. "Where are you living?" She felt inspired to give him a false address. He insisted on walking with her to the Waldorf, where she said her engagement was. "You don't ask me where I have been?" "I was just going to. The last I heard you were in the London Tower or somewhere. However did you get out?" "The same way like you ditt. I thought you should choin me therein, but you also told all you knew and some more yet, yes?" She saw then that he had turned state's evidence. Perhaps he had betrayed Sir Joseph. Somehow she found it possible to loathe him extra. She lacked the strength to deny his odious insinuation about herself. He went on: "Now I am in America. I could not dare go to Germany now. But here I try to gain back my place in _Deutschland_. These English think they use me for a stool-pitcheon. But they will find out, and when _Deutschland ist über alles--ach, Gott_! You shall help me. We do some work togedder. I come soon by your house. _Auf_--Goot-py." He left her at the hotel door and lifted his hat. She went into the labyrinth and lost herself. When her heart had ceased fluttering and she grew calm from very fatigue of alarm she resolved to steal out of New York. She spent an afternoon and an evening of indecision. Night brought counsel. Polly Widdicombe had offered her a haven, and in the country. It would be an ideal hiding-place. She set to work at midnight packing her trunk. CHAPTER II Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same effort. It was a wire Babel.