expression in her pretty, pale
face as, head bent, shoulder to shoulder with him, she moved
thoughtfully onward along the dunes, the fixed smile stamped on her
lips.

"What are you going to do with your memories?" she asked. "Pigeon-hole
and label them? Or fling them, like your winter repentance, in the Fire
of Spring?"

"What are you going to do with yours, Virginia?"

"Nothing. They are not disturbing enough to destroy. Besides, unlike
yours, they are my first memories of indiscretions, and they are too new
to forget easily, too incredible yet to hurt. A woman is seldom hurt by
what she cannot understand."

He passed one arm around her supple waist; they halted; he turned her
toward him.

"What is it you don't understand?"

"This."

"My kissing you? Like this?"

She neither avoided nor returned the caress, looking at him out of
impenetrable eyes more green than blue like the deep sea under changing
skies.

"Is this what you don't understand, Virginia?"

"Yes; that--and your moderation."

His smile changed, but it was still a smile.

"Nor I," he said. "Like our friend, Warren Hastings, I am astonished.
But there our resemblance ends."

The eagle on the wet sands ruffled, shook his silvery hackles, and
looked around at them. Then, head low and thrust forward, he hulked
slowly toward the remains of the dead fish from which but now he had
retired in the disgust of satiation.

Meanwhile Malcourt and Miss Suydam were walking cautiously forward
again, selecting every footstep as though treading on the crumbling
edges of an abyss.

"It's rather stupid that I never suspected it," she said, musing aloud.

"Suspected what?"

"The existence of this other woman called Virginia Suydam. And I might
have been mercifully ignorant of her until I died, if you had not looked
at me and seen us both at once."

"We all are that way."

"Not all women, Louis. Have you found them so? You need not answer.
There is in you, sometimes, a flash of infernal chivalry; do you know
it? I can forgive you a great deal for it; even for discovering that
other and not very staid person, so easily schooled, easily taught to
respond; so easily thrilled, easily beguiled, easily caressed. Why, with
her head falling back on your shoulder so readily, and her lips so
lightly persuaded, one can scarcely believe her to have been untaught
through all these years of dry convention and routine, or unaware of
that depravity, latent, which it