e favorite recipe of
philosophers."

"Your attitude wasn't that of enjoying solitude. It was that of
despair."

"I was a little fagged. I'm all right now."

As if in demonstration of her assertion she rose with a dryad lightness
and stepped forward for inspection into a spot of moonlight, where she
stood illuminated--and smiling.

"Do I look like a victim of despair?" she challenged and the man, with
a quick, almost gasping intake of his breath, leaned toward her and
declared in a voice of passionate fervor, "To me you look like the
incarnation of heart's desire."

Now, her mirth was less convincing, but for a time she fenced gallantly,
adroitly, though with a waning remnant of resistance. It was a sword
play of wills, but the man attacked with a saber of tempestuous love,
and the woman defended herself with a weakening rapier of finesse. She
was desperately tired and her heart was not in the fight, so she grew
less lightning-like of thrust and less sure of parry as the play went
on.

CHAPTER XXIX

When they had talked for ten minutes Stuart abruptly exclaimed,
"Dearest, it was not far from this spot that you once told me you loved
me in every way you knew how to love: that you wanted to be, to me, all
that a woman could be to a man. Have you forgotten? I told you that my
love was always yours ... have you forgotten that?"

Her hands went spasmodically to her breast and her eyes glowed with the
fire of struggle. Suddenly the physical impulses, which she could not
control, deserted the rallying strength of her mind, and she trembled
visibly.

"The two men who say they love me," she broke out vehemently, "are
succeeding between them in driving me mad."

"Because," he as emphatically answered, "you are trying to reconcile a
true and a false allegiance--because--"

"This isn't a time," she broke in on him desperately, "for preaching
theories to me. I'm hardly sane enough just now to stand that."

"I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of
bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher."

"I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you--" Her voice broke. "I
told you that I _must_ be alone."

"You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his
instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow."

His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers
were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets
were at l