Ethra saw him coming, and his stride and expression scared her. Not knowing exactly what to do, and not anticipating such a frame of mind in him, she turned over in her hammock and pretended to be asleep, as his figure loomed up in the mouth of the cave. "Miss Leslie!" His voice was stentorian. She awoke languidly, and did it very well, making a charming picture as she sat up in her hammock, a trifle confused, sweet blue eyes scarcely yet unclosed. "Mr. Langdon!" she exclaimed in soft surprise. He looked her squarely, menacingly, in the eyes. "I suppose," he said, "that all this is a grim parody on the past when women did the waiting until it was men's pleasure to make the next move. I suppose that my recent appraisement parallels the social inspection of a debutante--that my present hunger is paying for the wistful intellectual starvation to which men once doomed your sex; that my isolation represents the isolation from all that was vital in the times when women's opportunities were few and restricted; that my probation among you symbolises the toleration of my sex for whatever specimen of your sex they captured and set their mark on as belonging to them, and on view to the world during good behaviour." He stared at her flushed face, thoughtfully. "The allegory is all right," he said, "but you've cast the wrong man for the goat. I'm going." "Y-you can't go," she stammered, colouring painfully, "unless I give you a pass." "I see; it resembles divorce. My sex had to give yours a cause for escape, or you couldn't escape. And in here you must give me a pass to freedom, or I remain here and starve. Is that it?" She crimsoned to her hair, but said nothing. "Give me that pass," he said. "If I do every girl here will gossip----" "I don't care what they say. I'm going." She sat very still in the hammock, eyes vacant, chin on hand, considering. It was not turning out as she had planned. She had starved him too long. "Mr. Langdon," she said in a low voice, "if it is only because you are hungry----" "I'm not; I'm past mere hunger. You disciplined me because I took a human and natural interest in the pretty inhabitants of this new world. And I _told_ you that I never would have entered it except for you. But you made me pay for a perfectly harmless and happy curiosity. Well, I've starved and paid. Now I want to go. . . . Either I go or there'll be something doing--because I won't remain here and go hungry much longer." "S-something--doing?" she faltered. "Exactly. With the first----" "You can go if you wish," she said, flushing scarlet and springing out of the hammock. He waited, jaws set, while she seated herself at a table and wrote out the pass. "Thank you," he said, in such a rage that he could scarcely control his voice.