ing you a moonlight visit--it's really quite novel and
charming!--but it can't go on for ever! Just now you said you wanted me
to know a thing or two, and I presume you have explained yourself. What
you think or what you don't think about women doesn't interest me. I'm
one of the 'wastes on the wind!' _I_ shall not aid in the continuation
of the race,--heaven forbid! The race is too stupid and too miserable
to merit continuance. Everything has been done for it that can be done,
over and over again, from the beginning--till now,--and now--NOW!" She
paused, and despite himself the tone of her voice sent a thrill through
his blood of something like fear.

"NOW?--well! What NOW?" he demanded.

She lifted one hand and pointed upwards. Her face in the moonbeams
looked austere and almost spectral in outline.

"Now--the Change!" she answered--"The Change when all things shall be
made new!"

A silence followed her words,--a strange and heavy silence.

It was broken by her voice hushed to an extreme softness, yet clearly
audible.

"Good-night!--good-bye!"

He turned impatiently away to avoid further leave-taking--then, on a
sudden impulse, his mood changed.

"Morgana!"

The call echoed through emptiness. She was gone. He called again,--the
long vowel in the strange name sounding like "Mor-ga-ar-na" as a
shivering note on the G string of a violin may sound at the conclusion
of a musical phrase. There was no reply. He was--as he had desired to
be,--alone.

CHAPTER III

"She left New York several weeks ago,--didn't you know it? Dear me!--I
thought everybody was convulsed at the news!"

The speaker, a young woman fashionably attired and seated in a rocking
chair in the verandah of a favourite summer hotel on Long Island,
raised her eyes and shrugged her shoulders expressively as she uttered
these words to a man standing near her with a newspaper in his hand. He
was a very stiff-jointed upright personage with iron grey hair and
features hard enough to suggest their having been carved out of wood.

"No--I didn't know it"--he said, enunciating his words in the
deliberate dictatorial manner common to a certain type of American--"If
I had I should have taken steps to prevent it."

"You can't take steps to prevent anything Morgana Royal decides to do!"
declared his companion. "She's a law to herself and to nobody else. I
guess YOU couldn't stop her, Mr. Sam Gwent!"

Mr. Sam Gwent permitted himself to smile. It w