if you want me to love you as I once
did, and as I _can_ love. Oh, and I can--I can love! You don't know yet
how much."

"What shall I have to do?" he asked. "Do you mean anything in
particular, or----"

"Yes, I mean something in particular."

"I'll do it, darling, whatever it may be. I feel the strength."

She wrapped him in her arms and clung to him, talking softly, with her
lips against his hollowed cheek, so that her breath fluttered softly
past it with each half-whispered word.

"That's a promise," she said. "I won't let you break it. But you won't
want to break it. I'll love you so much--enough to make up for
everything. Enough to keep you from remembering those lights over
there."

"They're nothing to me," he assured her. "I don't believe I'll ever want
to see them again. There are other places where I can do better than at
Monte Carlo. Baccarat's a safer game than roulette or trente et
quarante, I begin to think, and I could adapt the system----"

"Never mind the system now! You'll have to go back to Monte to-morrow to
get your eighty pounds, and a cheque cashed for Mary Grant--a big one,
I hope. Then you can redeem some of our things. One trunk for each of us
will be enough, for I want to go a long way off and travel quickly."

"Where do you want to go?" Dauntrey asked, indulgently, in a dreaming
voice, as if her love and the force of her fierce vitality were
hypnotizing him. He spoke as if he were so near happiness again that he
would gladly go anywhere, to find it once more with Eve.

"I haven't made up my mind about that yet."

"Oh, I thought you had! You always make up your mind so quickly when you
want anything."

"I've been putting my mind to what we must do first, before we go away.
There _is_ a thing to do; and it will have to be done soon, or it will
be too late."

Her tone was suddenly sharp as a knife rubbed against steel.

"What thing?" her husband asked, startled out of his dream.

Instantly she softened again and clung to him and round him more closely
than before. "Darling," she said, "you've just told me that you'd do
anything for my sake."

"So I would. So I will."

"Sometimes men are ready to do anything except the one thing the women
who love them ask them to do."

"It won't be like that with me, Eve. Try me and see."

"I will. I want you to go with me far, far away, where we've never been
before, to make a new life, and belong only to each other. But before
we go, so