stroll on the beach?" she asked a shade wearily. "I'm tired of so many people."

They followed the twisting line of the wet sands and at last halted by the prow of a beached row-boat, where the girl enthroned herself, gazing meditatively off to sea.

"Conscience," he asked slowly, "you have used a diplomacy worthy of a better cause, in devising ways to keep me from talking with you alone—why?"

"Have I done that?" she countered.

"You know you have. Of course you've known I wanted to make love to you. Why wouldn't you let me?"

"Because," she answered gravely, meeting his eyes with full candor, "I didn't want you to—make love to me. I'm not ready for that."

"I haven't said I wasn't willing to wait, have I?" he suggested quietly. "You don't appear to throw barriers of silence between yourself and Billy."

"No. That's different.... I'm not—" Suddenly she broke off and laughed at herself.

Then a little startled, at her own frankness, she admitted in a low voice, "I'm not afraid of Billy's unsettling me."

The man felt his temples throb with a sudden and intoxicating elation. He steadied himself against its agitation to demand,

"And you are—afraid that I might?"

She was sitting with the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly nodded her confession.

"You see," she told him, after another long pause, "it's a thing—falling in love—that I should do rather riotously—if I did it at all. I shouldn't be able to think of much else."

Stuart Farquaharson wanted to seize her in his arms and protest that she could never love him too riotously, but he instead schooled his voice to a level almost monotonous.

"I fell in love with you—back there in the days of our childhood," he said slowly. "Maybe it was only a boy's dream—then—but now it's a man's dream—a life dream. You will have to be won out of battle, every wonderful reward does—but victory will come to me." His voice rose vibrantly. "Because winning it is the one inflexible purpose of my life, dominating every other purpose."

She had not interrupted him and now she was a little afraid of him—and of herself. Perhaps it was only the moon—but the moon swings the tides.

"Stuart—" Her voice held a tremor of pleading. "If you do love me—like that—you can wait. Just now I need you—but not as a lover. I need you as a friend whom I don't have to fight."

The man straightened and bowed. "Very well," he said, "I can wait—if I must. Your need comes first."

She gave him a grateful smile, then suddenly came to her feet and began speaking with such a passionate earnestness as he had not before heard from her lips.

"I think it's the right of every human being to live fully—not just half live through a soul-cramping routine. I think it's the right of a man or a woman to face all the things that make life, to think—even if they make mistakes—to fight for what they believe, even if they're wrong. I'd rather be Joan of Arc than the most sainted nun that ever took the veil!"

The young man's face lighted triumphantly, because that was also his creed. "I knew it!" he exclaimed. "I didn't have to hear your words to know that marking time in an age of marching would never satisfy you."

"And yet every influence that means home and family seems bent on condemning me to the dreariness and mustiness of a life that kills thought. I've thought about it so much that I'm afraid I've grown morbid." Once more her voice rang with passionate insurgency. "I feel as if I were being sent to Siberia."

Stuart answered with forced composure through which the thrill of a minute ago crept like an echo of departing trumpets. "Of course, I came out here to declare my love. I had waited for this chance ... the sea ... the moon—well! It's rather like asking for a field-marshal's baton and a curveting charger—and getting instead a musket and place in the ranks. The man who doesn't serve where he's put isn't much good...." He paused and then went on calmly, "What is this thing that haunts you?"

"When I finished at the preparatory school," she began, "father thought I'd gone far enough and I knew I needed college. At last I won a compromise. I was to have one year by way of trial, and then he was to decide which idea was right—his or mine."

"So now—"

"So now the jury has the case—and I'm terribly afraid I know the verdict in advance. Father is a minister of the old school and the unyielding New England type. I don't remember my mother, but sometimes I think the inflammatory goodness at home killed her. In our house you mustn't question a hell where Satan reigns as a personal god of Damnation. To doubt his spiked tail and cloven hoofs, would almost be heresy. That's our sort of goodness."

"And colleges fail to supply a course in the Chemistry of Brimstone," he suggested.

"They don't even frown on such ungodly things as socialism and suffrage," she supplemented.

He nodded. "They offer, in short, incubation for ideas questionably modern."

Her voice took on a fiery quality of enthusiasm.

"Life was never so gloriously fluid—so luminous—before. Breadth and humanity are being fought for. Men and women are facing things open-eyed, making splendid successes and splendid failures." After a moment's pause she added, wearily, "My father calls them fads."

"And you want to have a part in all that. You don't want only the culture of reading the Atlantic Monthly at a village fireside?"

"I want to play my little part in the game of things. The idea of being shielded from every danger and barred off from every effort, sickens me. If I am to lead a life I can be proud of, it must be because I've come out of the fight unshamed, not just because no one ever let me go into a fight."

She was standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were seeing visions off across the moonlit water.

"I might fail miserably, of course, but I should know that I'd had my chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the sand like an ostrich and, since she sees nothing, be womanly. If I have a soul at all, and it can't sail beyond a harbor's breakwater, I have nothing to lose, but if it can go out and come back safe it has the right to do it. That's what college means to me: the preparation for a real life: the chance to equip myself. That's why the question seems a vital crisis—why it is a vital crisis."

"Conscience," he said thoughtfully, "you have described the exact sort of intolerant piety, which tempts one to admire brilliant wickedness. You can't accept another's belief unless it's your own. That is one of Life's categorical rules. It's not a problem."

"It's so categorical," she retorted quickly, "that there is no answer to it except the facts. My father is old. He has burned out his life in his fierce service of his God and his conscience. To tell him how paltry is the sum of his life's effort, in my eyes, would be like laughing aloud at his sermon."

"And yet you can't possibly take up the life of an outgrown age because he prefers the thought of yesterday."

"I'm afraid I'll have to—and—"

"And what?"

"And I think—it's going to break my heart. I've got to live a lie to keep a man, who regards a lie as a mortal sin, happy in the belief that he has never tolerated a lie."