eaned closer, watching her bright deriding eyes, and she nodded.

"Ah yes," she sighed. "By and by you would go."

"You think because other men do that ... you think...?"

She nodded emphatically.

"... all men alike?" he finished lamely.

"They are!" she said quickly and laid her head against his shoulder for
a moment with a faint chuckle of laughter.

"All right," he whispered gravely, "they are, as you say. But when we
get ashore in Athens, we will get married. Now then...."

His tone was low but triumphant. She could have no reply to that. It
swept away all doubts in his own mind: and he thought her mind was like
his own, a lumber room of old-fashioned, very dusty conventions and
ideals. If he married her she must be convinced of his sincerity. It did
not occur to him that women are not interested very much in the
sincerity of a man, that he can be as unfaithful as he likes if he
fulfills her conception of beauty and power and genius, that a woman
like Evanthia might have a different notion of marriage from his own.

And she did not reply. He moved away from her, up-lifted by the mood of
the moment. There could be no reply to that save surrender, he thought
proudly.

And Evanthia was astonished. She sat there in the darkness, bound upon a
journey which would bring her, she believed, to the amiable and
faithless creature who had touched her imagination and who embodied for
her all the gaiety and elegance of Europe. And this other man, a man of
a distant, truculent, and predatory race, a race engaged in the
destruction of European civilization as a sacrifice to their own little
tribal god (which was the way Lietherthal had explained it to her) was
proposing to marry her. It bereft her of speech because she was busy
cooerdinating in her swift, shrewd mind all the advantages of such a
scheme. There was an allurement in it, too. Her imagination was caught
by the sudden vision of herself as the chatelaine of a villa. Yes! Her
eyes sparkled as she figured it. He came towards her again and, leaning
over, buried his face in the clean fresh fragrance of her hair. She
remembered that magical moment by the White Tower when he had
transcended his destiny and muttered hoarsely that he would go to hell
for her. She put the question to herself with terrible directness--could
she hold him? Could she exercise the mysterious power of her sex upon
him as upon men of her own race? She closed her eyes and sought blindly
for an