ou are too intelligent to find pleasure in Society's inane
pastimes. You admitted to me yourself that something seemed lacking in
your life. Shall I tell you what it is?"

He advanced closer and, looking fixedly at her, went on:

"I can read the secret in your beautiful eyes--the windows of your soul.
Shall I tell you what your heart desires? You are love-hungry. Your
whole being cries out for love. Not the infamous traffic in flesh and
honor which receives the blessing of fashionable churches, but the pure,
true, unselfish, ideal love that thrills a man and woman under God's
free sky. What good are your father's millions here? What do I care
about your houses, your gowns and your jewels? Here, stripped of
everything but your own sweet lovable nature, you are only a woman--a
woman I love and want to call mine own."

His voice held her spellbound. The tone of authority in his words
weakened her will-power. His ardent eyes, looking tenderly into hers,
fascinated her. She felt that the odds were fearfully against her. It
required all her moral strength to resist his pleading, yet there was
nothing here to which she could cling. At home, in New York, she could
take refuge behind a hundred excuses. The polite conventions of society
would lend her support. But here alone on this lonely island with this
man whom she knew in her heart she loved, this man who insisted on frank
explanations, straightforward answers, the odds were fearfully against
her. She felt herself weakening.

"Please don't," she murmured confusedly. "It's utterly impossible. Don't
you see how impossible it is--even if I did care for you? In a short
time a ship will come. We shall be taken off. We shall go back to New
York. Each of us will resume the old life, and this adventure will be
only a memory."

Armitage laughed cynically, and he made a gesture of impatience. His
manner suddenly changed. He assumed the old tone of superiority which
she had noticed when they first landed on the island.

"Don't deceive yourself," he said abruptly. "Some day things must be
understood as they are, and it might just as well be now."

He stopped and looked at her strangely.

"What do you mean?" demanded Grace uneasily.

"I mean," he went on slowly, "that no ship will come. We shall never go
back. The rest of our days must be spent here together."

He spoke with such authority, such conviction, that Grace felt that he
had good grounds for what he said. Her face pa