She sought a real-estate agent, Mr. Hailstorks, of the sort known as affable. But the dwellings he had to show were not even that. Places she had found not altogether odious before were rented now. Places that her heart went out to to-day proved to have been rented yesterday. Finally she ran across a residence of a sort. She sighed to Mr. Hailstorks: "Well, a carpenter made it--so let it pass for a house. I'll take it if it has a floor. I'm like Gelett Burgess: 'I don't so much care for a door, but this crawling around without touching the ground is getting to be quite a bore.'" "Yes, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, bewilderedly. He unlocked the door of somebody's tenantless ex-home with its lonely furniture, and Marie Louise intruded, as one does, on the chairs, rugs, pictures, and vases that other people have been born with, have achieved, or have had thrust upon them. She wondered, as one does, what sort of beings they could have been that had selected such things to live among, and what excuse they had had for them. Mr. Hailstorks had a surprise in store for her. He led her to the rear of the house and raised a shade. Instead of the expectable back yard, Marie Louise was startled to see a noble landscape leap into view. The house loomed over a precipitous descent into a great valley. A stream ran far below, and then the cliffs rose again opposite in a succession of uplifting terraces that reminded her somehow of Richmond Hill superbly built up above the silver Thames. "Whatever is all that?" she cried. "Rock Creek Park, ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks, who had a sincere real-estately affection for parks, since they raised the price of adjoining property and made renting easier. "And what's the price of all this grandeur?" "Only three hundred a month," said Mr. Hailstorks. "Only!" gasped Marie Louise. "It will be four hundred in a week or two--yes ma'am," said Mr. Hailstorks. So Marie Louise seized it before its price rose any farther. She took a last look at Rock Creek Park, henceforth her private game-preserve. As she stared, an idea came to her. She needed one. The park, it occurred to her, was an excellent wilderness to get lost in--with Ross Davidge. * * * * * She was late to her meeting with Davidge--not unintentionally. He was waiting on the steps of the hotel, smoking, when she drove up in the car she had bought for her Motor Corps work. He said what she hoped he would say: "I didn't know you drove so well." She quoted a popular phrase: "'You don't know the half of it, dearie.' Hop in, and I'll show you." He thought of Lady Clifton-Wyatt, and Marie Louise knew he thought of her. But he was not hero or coward enough to tell a woman that he had an engagement with another woman. She pretended to have forgotten that he had told her, though she could think of little else. She whisked round the corner of I Street, or Eye Street, and thence up Sixteenth Street, fast and far.