Hildegarde von Essen returned reluctantly to Detroit late in June, some two weeks before Potter Waite, his work in Washington having borne fruit and the fruit been harvested, came to put in motion the gigantic new industry which was to mean so much to his city--and to the whole world. Hildegarde came home with dragging steps and black forebodings. For months she had tried to forget Detroit, forget her father, put from her mind that searing knowledge of her father's infamy. She had succeeded but poorly. People at Palm Beach had found her eccentric--flighty they had called her. She had been flighty. There was no absurdity she would not attempt in her demand for excitement and restlessness; she caused talk; she attracted few--even of the younger men, for, somehow, they felt uncomfortable in her presence. She was never still, demanded action always, and cared little how outrageous to convention that action might be. And she was changeable. In an instant, without perceptible cause, she would descend from reckless deviltry to somber moroseness. Even her beauty, her compelling magnetism, her known wealth, did not suffice to hold admirers. One young man announced his firm belief that she was a trifle balmy, and that, if she weren't, he'd be hanged if her gait wasn't too tricky for him to harness up to her. It was the general opinion. The same opinion prevailed later at Pinehurst, at Old Point, in Washington. Who was there to guess that a young girl was ridden by such an Old Man of the Sea? Her father forbade her to come home without his permission, and she had not intended to come home until that meeting with Potter Waite in Washington had made Detroit a magnet with a power she could not resist, no matter how much she dug in her little heels and hung back. . . . She must be near him; must be where she could see him, feel his existence. He called to her in his vexed heart and the call was carried to her own heart.... So she went home. She arrived without warning, and the arrival of her taxicab at her father's door was the first indication that household had of her coming. The servant who opened the door did not know her; he had appeared during her absence. Other servants were new, and the whole aspect of the house had changed. She did not like it. It held a promise of something not allaying to her terrors. The very air of the house was heavy. As she went up to her room she heard the strange manservant telephone her father, "Your daughter has arrived," and presently he rapped on her door and said, obsequiously, "It is your father's wish that you do not leave the house until he arrives." She had a feeling of being surrounded, watched, shut off from communication with the world. She went to the telephone herself with intention to speak to some one, some one outside that house, some friend, she cared little whom, but the servant, still obsequious, intervened. "Your father directed, Miss von Essen, that you were not to make use of the telephone."