But Miss Suydam and Mr. Malcourt were not in the labyrinth.  At that very moment they were slowly strolling along the eastern dunes where the vast solitude of sky and sea seemed to depress even the single white-headed eagle standing on the wet beach, head and tail adroop, motionless, fish-gorged.  No other living thing was in sight except the slim, blue dragon-flies, ceaselessly darting among the beach-grapes; nothing else stirred except those two figures on the dunes, moving slowly, heads bent as though considering the advisability of every step in the breaking sands.  There was a fixed smile on the girl’s lips, but her eyes were mirthless, almost vacant.

“So you’ve decided to go?” she said.

“Portlaw decides that sort of thing for me.”

“It’s a case of necessity?”

Malcourt answered lightly:  “He intends to go.  Who can stop a fat and determined man?  Besides, the season is over; in two weeks there will be nobody left except the indigenous nigger, the buzzards, and a few cast-off summer garments—­”

“And a few cast-off winter memories,” she said.  “You will not take any away with you, will you?”

“Do you mean clothes?”

“Memories.”

“I’ll take some.”

“Which?”

“All those concerning you.”

“Thank you, Louis.”  They had got that far.  And a trifle farther, for her hand, swinging next his, encountered it and their fingers remained interlocked.  But there was no change of 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.