Once, as if in explanation for words unspoken, he commented nervously on the sensation of unreality with which these tropic scenes inspired him, and Rachael, who longed to withdraw her hand from his arm, told him of an entertainment peculiar to the Islands, a torchlight hunt for land-crabs, which once a year travel down from the mountains to the sea, to bathe and shed their shells.  Words hastened.  Before she drew breath she had arranged a hunt for the night of the 10th of April, and received his promise to be one of her guests.  They were not so happy as they had been within doors, for the world seemed wider.  But their inner selves pressed so hard toward each other that finally they were driven to certain egotisms as a relief.

“I think little of the future,” she said, after a direct question, “for that means looking beyond my mother’s death, and that is the one fact I have not the courage to face.  But of course I know that it holds nothing for me.  A ball occasionally, and the conversation of clever men who admire me but care for some one else, books the rest of the week, and life alone on a shelf of the mountain.  The thought that I shall one day be old does not console me as it may console men, for with women the heart never grows old.  The body withers, and the heart in its awful eternal youth has the less to separate and protect it from the world that has no use for it.  Then the body dies and is put away, but the heart is greedily consumed to feed the great pulses of the world that lives faster every year.  We give, and give, and give.”

“And are only happy in giving,” said Hamilton, quickly.  “But if men preserve the balance of the world by taking all that women give them, at least the best of us find our happiness in the gifts of one woman, and a woman so besought dare not assert that her heart is empty.  I understand—­and no one more clearly than I do to-night—­that if she give too much, she may curse her heart and look out bitterly upon the manifold interests that could suppress it for weeks and months—­if life were full enough.  Is yours?  What would you sacrifice if you came to me?”

He asked the question calmly, for there were people on every side of them, but he asked it on an uncontrollable impulse, nevertheless; he had vowed to himself that he would wait a month.

His natural repose was greater than hers, for she had the excitable nerves of the Tropics.  He felt her arm quiver before she dropped her hand from his arm.  But she replied almost as calmly:  “Nothing after my mother’s death.  Absolutely nothing.  When a woman suffers as I have done, and her future is ruined in any case, the world counts for very little with her, unless it always has counted for more than anything else.  We grow the more cynical and contemptuous as we witness the foolish gallantries of women who have so much to lose.  I am not hard.  I am very soft about many things, and since you came I am become the very tragedy of youth; but I have no