He thought of dozens of explanations, most of them wild, but none of them so wild as the truth––that Marie Louise was cowering under the accusation of being a German agent.
He resolved that he would forget Marie Louise, discharge her from the employment of his thoughts. Yet that night as he lay cooking in his hot berth he thought of Marie Louise instead of ships. None of his riot of thoughts was so fantastic as the fact that she was even then thinking of ships and not of him.
That night Marie Louise ransacked the library that the owner of Grinden Hall had left with the other furniture. Some member of the family had been a cadet at Annapolis, and his old text-books littered the shelves. Marie Louise selected and bore away an armload, not of novels, but of books whose very backs had repelled her before. They were the very latest romance to her now.
The authors of An Elementary Manual for the Deviation of the Compass in Iron Ships, The Marine Steam-engine, and 147 An Outline of Ship-building, Theoretical and Practical, could hardly have dreamed that their works would one night go up-stairs in the embrace of a young woman’s arms. The books would have struck a naval architect as quaintly old-fashioned, but to Marie Louise they were as full of news as the latest evening extra. The only one she could understand with ease was Captain Samuels’s From the Forecastle to the Cabin, and she was thrilled by his account of the struggles of his youth, his mutinies, his champion of the Atlantic, the semi-clipper Dreadnaught, but most of all, by his glowing picture of the decay of American marine glory.
She read till she could sit up no longer. Then she undressed and dressed for sleep, snapped on the reading-lamp, and took up another book, Bowditch’s American Navigation. It was the “Revised Edition of 1883,” but it was fresh sensation to her. She lay prone like the reading Magdalen in the picture, her hair pouring down over her shoulders, her bosom pillowed on the volume beneath her eyes.
CHAPTER IX
Passengers arriving at Washington in the early morning may keep their cubbyholes until seven, no later. By half past seven they must be off the car. Jake Nuddle was an ugly riser. He had always regarded the alarm-clock as the most hateful of all the inventions of capitalists to enslave the poor. Jake had strange ideas of capitalists, none stranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock off work early.
Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife’s prerogatives. On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the curtains, “S’em o’clock, please!” did not please Jake at all.