said hurriedly,
"I must leave you now, but please promise to call to-morrow evening,
I've lots I want to ask you."

And Winn, yielding to the magic of her luring eyes, promised and went
his way.

It was after midnight before he finished his column account of this
affair, and turning it over to the night editor, left the newspaper
office.

The streets were deserted, only now and then some late worker like
himself hurrying homeward; and as he pushed on, his footsteps echoed
between the brick walls of the narrow street he was following. Somehow
their clatter carried his thoughts back to Rockhaven and one night when
they had sounded so loud on the plank walk there. When his room was
reached he lighted a cigar, and as once before, when he had gone to the
tower on Norse Hill to commune with himself, he fell into a revery.

Now, as then, it was to balance in his mind one woman's face and one
woman's influence against another's.

He saw Mona as she was then, as she had been to him for months, a
sweet, simple, untutored girl, with the eyes of a Madonna and the soul
of a saint. He saw her in the cave, once fern-carpeted by her tender
thought, and once again heard the notes from her violin quivering in
that rock-walled gorge.

And now it was all ended!

Then came this other woman's face and form,--a brilliant,
self-contained, self-poised, cultured exotic, knowing men's weaknesses
and keen to reach and sway them. A social sun, where the other was but a
pale and tender moon.

But Winn's heart was still true to Rockhaven, and the ecstatic moment,
when he had held Mona close in his arms, still seemed a sacred bond.

"I'll never believe it is to end thus," he thought, "until I go there
and hear it from her lips."

But he kept his promise and called on Ethel the next evening.

She had been charming always; now she was fascinating, for somehow it
had come to this conquest-loving woman, that Winn's heart was elsewhere,
and that was a spur.

Then beyond was a better thought, for the very indifference that piqued
her also awoke respect, and he seemed to her, as she had told him, an
eagle among jackdaws.

"I am glad you have found an occupation," she said, as he once more sat
in her parlor, "but I wish it were less menial. You have outgrown
servitude since you went to the island. What has wrought the change? Was
it the sea winds?"

"Maybe," answered Winn, "or constantly looking out upon a boundless
ocean. That always dwa