" he rejoined quickly, "yet isn't it curious that man
seems happiest under monogamy, which is directly contrary to nature. Man
is naturally polygamous."

"Ah, but that is only brute love. It rests on nothing tangible. Like a
tiny flame, it is extinguished by the first adverse breath of wind. Man
thinks he is polygamous. But that is only the beast in him--the beast
with which his better and higher nature is ever at war. The superior man
learns to control his appetites, the baser man indulges them, and
therefore is nearer to the tailed ancestry from which he originally
sprang. That is not love as I understand it."

He leaned quickly forward.

"How do you understand love?" he asked, in low, eager tones.

Grace smiled, and, poutingly, she protested:

"Why do you question me in this way?"

Slightly raising himself on one hand, he drew nearer to her and looked
steadily up into her face until the boldness of his gaze embarrassed
her. Her cheeks reddened, and she lowered her eyes.

"What do you know about love?" he demanded hoarsely.

"Every woman knows or thinks she knows," she replied, with affected
carelessness.

He was silent for a moment, and then he went on:

"Suppose a woman--say a friend of yours--loved a man, with all the
strength of her heart and soul. Suppose special conditions made her
legal union with that man impossible. Would you forgive her if her great
love tempted her to give herself to that man, or would you insist that
she should suffer and make him suffer--alone?"

She listened with averted face. Well she knew the purport of these
questions. But her face remained impassive, and her voice was calm as
she replied gently:

"No woman may sit in judgment over another woman. No woman can tell
positively what she might do under all circumstances. The temptation
might be such that even a saint would succumb. That reminds me. Do you
know the story of the Abbess of Jouarre?"

"No," replied Armitage; "what is it? Tell it me."

He settled down more comfortably in the sand to listen. Grace smiled,
and took up her sewing again.

"It's a story that made a deep impression on me," she said. "It was
during the bloodiest days of the French Revolution. On the Place de la
Concorde a hundred lives were being sacrificed on the guillotine daily
to appease the savage fury of the populace. Among the aristocrats
sentenced to death and who awaited in the Temple prison their turn to be
summoned to the scaffold was a