Potter's eyes were dark with the brooding expression which his friends counted a signal of danger, but he remained motionless, save to turn toward Hildegarde. "I am sorry, Miss von Essen," he said. "I shouldn't have brought you. I might have foreseen--" She smiled. It was not a bright smile, but a reckless smile, as reckless as one of Potter's own might be. "Thank you for coming.... I hope we shall be friends." She did not glance at her father, but walked erectly up the steps and disappeared in the house. Von Essen continued verbally to chastise Potter, who did not look at him. Perhaps he did not dare, fearing the weakness of his self-restraint. The young man threw his car into gear and moved away, leaving von Essen gesticulating behind him. He drove to his own house, a mile beyond. Before he reached there the brooding darkness was gone from his eyes; they twinkled. He was thinking of Hildegarde. CHAPTER IV Detroit was flying high; it was spending as few cities have ever spent. Wealth poured in upon her, and men who, ten years before, had worried when they heard their landlady's step on the stairs were building palaces in the midst of grounds for which they paid fabulous sums for each foot of frontage. No clerk or school-teacher was too poor to own a lot in a subdivision, laid out with sidewalks and shade trees, miles beyond the city's limits. Overnight land increased in value, so that fortunate ones who paid ten dollars down on a lot sold their equities within the month at profits of hundreds of dollars. Men bought distant pasture-land for a song and sold it for an opera. The streets were full of tales of this man who had made a hundred thousand dollars, of that man who had cleared sixty thousand, of men by the dozens whose bank-accounts had increased more modestly, but still by thousands. Land that had gone begging at ten dollars a foot was eagerly sought at a hundred dollars.... This was a by-product of that great manufactory of wealth, the automobile. As for it, and its growing sister, munitions, one believed whatever was told, and the tale fell short of the truth. One manufacturer filled the banks with his deposits, and, when they refused to accept more, was obliged to build his own bank. When money flows in torrentially it washes away walls of economy. Detroit spent as it earned--lavishly. It was just completing what is perhaps the most magnificent clubhouse in the United States--a million-dollar plaything, the money for which had been raised almost in an hour. It was the new Detroit Athletic Club, outgrowth of that historic and honorable old athletic club which had so long been a landmark on Woodward Avenue when land was cheap and a quarter-mile cinder track and football-field might be maintained in the heart of the city. Five thousand men were found instantly who could afford this luxury.