He rose and returned to his old position, leaning over the veranda, looking down to the sea. "You are cold-blooded, I think, Evadne," he reiterated. She said nothing, but rested her head on the back of her chair and smiled. She was not cold-blooded, and he knew it as well as she did. She was only a nineteenth century woman of the higher order with senses so refined that if her moral as well as her physical being were not satisfied in love, both would revolt. They were silent some time after that, and then he turned to her once more. "Will you promise me that one thing, Evadne?" he asked. "Promise me that during my lifetime you will never mix yourself up--never take part publicly in any question of the day. It would be too deuced ridiculous for me, you know, to have my name appearing in the papers in connection with measures of reform, and all that sort of thing." "I promise to spare you that kind of annoyance at all events," she answered without hesitation, making the promise, not because she was infirm of purpose, but because she was indefinite; she had no impulse at the time to do anything, and no notion that she would ever feel impelled to act in opposition to this wish of his. "Thank you," he said, and there was another little pause, which he was again the first to break. "You would have loved me, then, if I had lived a different life," he said. "Yes," she answered simply, "I should have loved you. No other man has made me feel for a moment what I felt for you, while I believed that you were all that a man should be who proposes to marry; and I don't think any other man ever will, You were born for me. Why, oh, why! did you not live for me?" "I wish to God I had," he answered. She rose impulsively, and stretched out her hands to him. Its was a movement of pain and pity, sorrow and sympathy, and he understood it. "You meant to marry always," she said, "You treasured in your heart your ideal of a woman; why could you not have lived so that you would have been _her_ ideal too, when at last you met?" He took her two little outstretched hands and held them a moment in his, looking down at them, "I wish to God I had," he repeated. "Did it never occur to you that a woman has her ideal as well as a man?" she said: "that she loves purity and truth, and loathes degradation and vice more than a man does?" "Theoretically, yes," he answered; "but you find practically that women will marry anyone. If they were more particular, we should be more particular too." "Ah, that is our curse," said Evadne--"yours and mine. If women had been 'more particular' in the past, you would have been a good man, and I should have been a happy wife to-day."