"Oh, love!" Once more Gwynne gazed down upon the sleepless city, where
the lights seemed to powder the upper air with gold dust. "Perhaps. It
seemed to me that day in Park Lane that all the heat died out of my
veins. I am only just beginning to feel alive once more. But I have no
wish as yet to experience the passion of love again--not even with you;
although if you would cry off in some respects I don't know but that I
should still like to marry you."

"At least you could beat me if I did not behave."

He laughed. "I don't doubt I should want to. No, I'll never let myself
go like that again; but I should be sure first that my will was the
stronger of the two."

"You carefully abstain from proposing so that I cannot make the retort I
should like to."

"You may. I know you won't have me. But that does not alter the fact
that the same ancestral lines have given us an inconceivable number of
molecules that are subtly responsive. The great cleavage has
accomplished as many points of divergence and contrast. Therefore is
there, in me, at least, an insistent whisper for ancestral and long
denied rights. You will feel it in time--"

"How much you have thought about it!"

"My mind is pretty well oiled: it does not take me years to work out any
proposition. To tell you the truth, I have never put that undercurrent
of consciousness into words until to-night. All the same, even if I
loved you, if I finally believed you to be the stronger of the two, I
should take the next boat for England. California wouldn't hold me. And
I should not say good-bye."

"That would be a confession of weakness."

"It is one I'd be the better for making."

"Well, anyhow, as I am hostess I can order you to bed. It must be one
o'clock. I don't doubt you will find more than one affinity if you are
awakening; that is merely the mating instinct. Good-night."

Far too hospitable and high-handed to incommode a guest, she did not
tell him that Paula had gone, and that Stone had sauntered out in search
of a "bracer," and had not returned. Gwynne slept the sleep of the
unburdened conscience, and returned to Rosewater by the first
train--Isabel was remaining in town for another day--ignorant not only
of having violated the proprieties, but of the fact that a former
inhabitant of Rosewater lived not far from the foot of the bluff.

XXV

Two weeks later Lady Victoria was established in the house on Russian
Hill. She had given no intimation