. Le
Moyne, quite unconscious of her presence, looked down into the valley.

Wilson appeared on the wooden porch above the terrace, and stood, his
eyes searching the half light for her. If he came down to her, the man
at the next table might turn, would see her--

She rose and went swiftly back toward the hotel. All the gayety was
gone out of the evening for her, but she forced a lightness she did not
feel:--

"It is so dark and depressing out there--it makes me sad."

"Surely you do not want to dine in the house?"

"Do you mind?"

"Just as you wish. This is your evening."

But he was not pleased. The prospect of the glaring lights and soiled
linen of the dining-room jarred on his aesthetic sense. He wanted a
setting for himself, for the girl. Environment was vital to him. But
when, in the full light of the moon, he saw the purplish shadows under
her eyes, he forgot his resentment. She had had a hard day. She was
tired. His easy sympathies were roused. He leaned over and ran his and
caressingly along her bare forearm.

"Your wish is my law--to-night," he said softly.

After all, the evening was a disappointment to him. The spontaneity had
gone out of it, for some reason. The girl who had thrilled to his glance
those two mornings in his office, whose somber eyes had met his fire for
fire, across the operating-room, was not playing up. She sat back in her
chair, eating little, starting at every step. Her eyes, which by every
rule of the game should have been gazing into his, were fixed on the
oilcloth-covered passage outside the door.

"I think, after all, you are frightened!"

"Terribly."

"A little danger adds to the zest of things. You know what Nietzsche
says about that."

"I am not fond of Nietzsche." Then, with an effort: "What does he say?"

"Two things are wanted by the true man--danger and play. Therefore he
seeketh woman as the most dangerous of toys."

"Women are dangerous only when you think of them as toys. When a man
finds that a woman can reason,--do anything but feel,--he regards her
as a menace. But the reasoning woman is really less dangerous than the
other sort."

This was more like the real thing. To talk careful abstractions like
this, with beneath each abstraction its concealed personal application,
to talk of woman and look in her eyes, to discuss new philosophies with
their freedoms, to discard old creeds and old moralities--that was
his game. Wilson became content, interested