“I wished to speak to you about myself—­if, somehow you could help me to say what—­what is very difficult for a girl to say to a man—­even when she loves him....  I don’t think I can say it, but I’ll try.”

“Then if you’ll come to the balcony—­”

“No, I can’t trust you—­or myself—­unless we promise each other.”

“Have I got to do that again?”

“Yes, if I am to go with you.  I promise!  Do you?”

“If I must,” he said with very bad grace—­so ungraciously in fact that as they passed from the eastern corridor on to the Spanish balcony she forgot her own promise and slipped her hand into his in half-humourous, half-tender propitiation.

“Are you going to be disagreeable to me, Garry?”

“You darling!” he said; and, laughing, yet secretly dismayed at her own perversion, she hurriedly untwisted her fingers from his and made a new and fervid promise to replace the one just broken.

The moonlight was magnificent, silvering forest, dune, and chaparral. 
Far to the east a thin straight gleam revealed the sea.

She seated herself under the wall, lying back against it; he lay extended on the marble shelf beside her, studying the moonlight on her face.

“What was it you had to tell me, Shiela?  Remember I am going in the morning.”

“I’ve turned cowardly; I cannot tell you....  Perhaps later....  Look at the Seminole moon, Garry.  They have such a pretty name for it in March—­Tau-sau-tchusi—­’Little Spring Moon’!  And in May they call it the ’Mulberry Moon’—­Kee-hassi, and in November it is a charming name—­Hee-wu-li—­’Falling Leaf Moon’!—­and August is Hyothlucco—­’Big Ripening Moon.’ ...  Garry, this moonlight is filling my veins with quicksilver.  I feel very restless, very heathenish.” ...  She cast a slanting side-glance at him, lips parting with soundless laughter; and in the witchery of the moon she seemed exquisitely unreal, head tipped back, slender throat and shoulders snow-white in the magic lustre that enveloped them.

Resting one bare arm on the marble she turned, chin on shoulder, looking mischievously down at him, lovely, fresh, perfect as the Cherokee roses that spread their creamy, flawless beauty across the wall behind her.

Imperceptibly her expression changed to soft friendliness, to tenderness, to a hint of deeper emotion; and her lids drooped a little, then opened gravely under the quick caress of his eyes; and very gently she moved her head from side to side as reminder and refusal.

“Another man’s wife,” she said deliberately....  “Thy neighbour’s wife....  That’s what we’ve done!”

Like a cut of a whip her words brought him upright to confront her, his blood tingling on the quick edge of anger.

For always, deep within him, lay that impotent anger latent; always his ignorance of this man haunted him like the aftermath of an ugly dream.  But of the man himself she had never spoken since that first day in the wilderness.  And then she had not named him.