He grumbled, “Why not? I mean it.” She knew he meant it. She suffered in the temptation to say yes, to end everything like that, to take what consequences followed when he should some day know, and hate her for it. She looked at Julia. Not alone the beauty of her, but some suggestion in its generous richness of a like nature, made the rest of them seem cheap. Florence felt faded as she looked. What a woman for a man to lose! Longacre’s eyes followed the direction Florence’s had taken. He made an impatient movement. If he stayed a few days longer under the girl’s spell, he would find out himself how hard matters were with him. But before that happened he must be free of _her_. It came to Florence all at once that this man would not free himself. What a loyalty to lose! And to put it away with her own hands! “Florence!” he persisted. She meant to say that she had something to tell him later that would answer his question, but her tongue tricked her into a gay evasion. She put him off. Because she saw the end must come, soon or late, she put it off. She would tell him to-morrow. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII LONGACRE TRAPS HIMSELF “TO-MORROW’S” sun rose on a miraculous world that dripped and steamed, and breathed a thousand sweet scents into a cloudless sky. The coast road, white for five months with flying dust, was black, with flashing pools of water among the trees. Their leaves, so long powdered pale with summer, were glistening green, shaking in the wind that was subsiding slowly. The breakers still bellowed up the little beaches and battered the rocky promontories; but they were sapphire-blue till their crests curled over,—no longer tattered by the wind, but breaking, far as eye could follow around the coast, in long white semicircles of foam. “Miramar” was flung wide to this morning of “latter spring,” and the multitudinous sharp odors of the garden poured through open doors and windows. The house was unpeopled. All were abroad in the garden, strolling down the spongy paths, shaking cataracts of drops from dahlia and chrysanthemum in their passing; whistling up the dogs across the terraces; calling to one another—scattering and rallying. Theirs was a high, animal pulse—such relish and excitement of living as a runner has who pulls himself together for a leap. Those purposes and emotions that had had their growth in the thick atmosphere of the storm were quickened, pressing against circumstance, ready to burst out. They boded a crisis.