“Please, Louis!”

“Dear, I am right.  Even Constance Palliser, still physically superb, but mentally morbid—­in love with what once was Wayward—­with the ghost she raised in her dead girlhood, there on the edge of yesterday—­”

“Louis!  Louis!  And you!  What were you yesterday?  What are you to-day?”

“What do I care what I was and am?—­Dutch, British, burgher, or cavalier?—­What the deuce do I care, my dear?  The Malcourts are rotten; everybody knows it.  Tressilvain is worse; my sister says so.  As I told you, the old families are done for—­all except yours—­”

“I am the last of mine, Louis.”

“The last and best—­”

“Are you laughing?”

“No; you are the only human one I’ve ever heard of among your race—­the sweetest, soundest, best—­”

“I?...  What you say is too terrible to laugh at.  I—­guilty in mind—­unsound—­contaminated—­”

“Temporarily.  I’m going to-night.  Time and absence are the great antiseptics.  When the corrupt cause disappears the effect follows.  Cheer up, dear; I take the night train.”

But she only pressed her pale face closer to his shoulder.  Their interlocked shadows, huge, fantastic, streamed across the eastern dunes as they moved slowly on together.

“Louis!”

“Yes?”

She could not say it.  Close to the breaking point, she was ready now to give up to him more than he might care for—­the only shred left which she had shrunk from letting him think was within his reach for the asking—­her name.

Pride, prejudice, had died out in the fierce outbreak of a heart amazingly out of place in the body of one who bore her name.

Generations of her kinsmen, close and remote, had lived in the close confines of narrow circles—­narrow, bloodless, dull folk, almost all distantly related—­and they had lived and mated among themselves, coldly defiant of that great law which dooms the over-cultivated and inbred to folly and extinction.

Somewhere, far back along the race-line, some mongrel ancestor had begun life with a heart; and, unsuspected, that obsolete organ had now reappeared in her, irritating, confusing, amazing, and finally stupefying her with its misunderstood pulsations.

At first, like a wounded creature, consciousness of its presence turned her restless, almost vicious.  Then from cynicism to incredulity she had passed the bitter way to passion, and the shamed recoil from it; to recklessness, and the contempt for it, and so through sorrow and humility to love—­if it were love to endure the evil in this man and to believe in the good which he had never yet revealed to her save in a half-cynical, half-amused content that matters rest in statu quo.