nd of your voice. Don't go
and leave me like this--don't go--"

Miss Suydam's head fell. She was crying.

* * * * *

The eagle on the wet beach, one yellow talon firmly planted on its
offal, tore strip after strip from the quivering mass. The sun etched
his tinted shadow on the sand.

When the tears of Miss Suydam had been appropriately dried, they turned
and retraced their steps very slowly, her head resting against his
shoulder, his arm around her thin waist, her own hand hanging loosely,
trailing the big straw hat and floating veil.

They spoke very seldom--very, very seldom. Malcourt was too busy
thinking; Virginia too stunned to realise that, it was, now, her other
austere self, bewildered, humiliated, desperate, which was walking amid
the solitude of sky and sea with Louis Malcourt, there beneath the
splendour of the westering sun.

The eagle, undisturbed, tore at the dead thing on the beach, one yellow
talon embedded in the offal.

Their black chair-boy lay asleep under a thicket of Spanish bayonet.

"Arise, O Ethiope, and make ready unto us a chariot!" said Malcourt
pleasantly; and he guided Virginia into her seat while the fat darky
climbed up behind, rubbing slumber from his rolling and enormous eyes.

Half-way through the labyrinth they met Miss Palliser and Wayward.

"Where on earth have you been?" asked Virginia, so candidly that
Wayward, taken aback, began excuses. But Constance Palliser's cheeks
turned pink; and remained so during her silent ride home with Wayward.

Lately the world had not been spinning to suit the taste of Constance
Palliser. For one thing Wayward was morose. Besides he appeared
physically ill. She shrank from asking herself the reason; she might
better have asked him for her peace of mind.

Another matter: Virginia, the circumspect, the caste-bound, the
intolerant, the emotionless, was displaying the astounding symptoms
peculiar to the minx! And she had neither the excuse of ignorance nor of
extreme youth. Virginia was a mature maiden, calmly cognisant of the
world, and coolly alive to the doubtful phases of that planet. And why
on earth she chose to affiche herself with a man like Malcourt,
Constance could not comprehend.

And another thing worried the pretty spinster--the comings, goings, and
occult doings of her nephew with the most distractingly lovely and
utterly impossible girl that fate ever designed to harass the soul of
any youn