those two small words and put it to her, without
explanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless and
callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but
different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to
which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact
remained. "I'll take you back," he added.

But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've
taken that away from me, nothing else counts."

He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an
indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn
face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who
had been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy-going
Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul.

"All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the
credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and
blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a
touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose
one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he
sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes.

"This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth,
and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it,
naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who always
gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere to
be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?"

"Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed
in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes.

There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting
drumming of the sea.

"One night, in Paris, when I was towering on the false confidence of
twenty-one,"--curious how, even at that moment, he spoke with a certain
self-consciousness,--"I came out of the Moulin Rouge alone and walked
back to the Maurice. It was the first time I'd ever been on the other
side, and I was doing it all in the usual way of the precocious
undergraduate. But the 'gay Paree' stuff that was specially
manufactured to catch the superfluous francs of the pornographic
tourist and isn't really in the least French, bored me, almost at once.
And that night, going slowly to the hotel, sickened by painted women,
chypre and raw champagne I turn