ocation in them preoccupied
him--"I remembered you, and I have sometimes hoped we might meet again.
Is that amends for the very bad taste I displayed in speaking of your
engagement before it has been announced?"

"I am not engaged--to be married," he said deliberately.

She looked at him steadily, and he sustained the strain of the gaze in
his own untroubled fashion.

"You are not engaged?"

"No."

She straightened up, resting her weight on one bare arm, then leisurely
laid her length on the burning sands and, face framed between her
fingers, considered him in silence.

In her attitude, in her very conversation with this man there was, for
her, a certain sense of abandonment; a mental renouncing of all that had
hitherto characterised her in her relations with an always formal world;
as though that were necessary to meet him on his own level.

Never before had she encountered the temptation, the opportunity, or the
person where the impulse to discard convention, conviction, training,
had so irresistibly presented itself. Nor could she understand it now;
yet she was aware, instinctively, that she was on the verge of the
temptation and the opportunity; that there existed a subtle something in
this man, in herself, that tempted to conventional relaxation. In all
her repressed, regulated, and self-suppressed career, all that had ever
been in her of latent daring, of feminine audacity, of caprice, of
perverse provocation, stirred in her now, quickening with the slightest
acceleration of her pulses.

Apparently a man of her own caste, yet she had never been so obscurely
stirred by a man of her own caste--had never instinctively divined in
other men the streak which this man, from the first interchange of
words, had brought out in her.

Aware of his attraction, hazily convinced that she had no confidence in
him, the curious temptation persisted and grew; and she felt very young
and very guilty like a small child consenting to parley with another
child whose society has been forbidden. And it seemed to her that
somehow she had already demeaned herself by the tentative toward a
common understanding with an intellect and principles of a grade
inferior to her own.

"That was a very pretty woman you were so devoted to in the
Adirondacks," she said.

He recalled the incident with a pleasant frankness which left her
unconvinced.

Suddenly it came over her that she had had enough of him--more than was
good for her, and