"It's as magnificent, in its way, as a mountain peak, or the going down of the sun, that puny men should accept the outrage of life and the insult of death so nobly, with so little crying out. When one thinks of it"--he laughed harshly--"the old gods and heroes were pygmies compared with modern men. What were their doings and their destinies to the hopeless, silent battle men are waging, without God and without hope in the world? The men of to-day don't go reeling into battle, drunken with the wine of hope, or dazed with the fairy tales of faith. But they fight none the less well, knowing they go out to die, and not even sure for what cause. It is so they fulfil the end of the world. Nothing in it is mightier than the spirit of man calmly confronting his fate." She drew a quick breath. "You've put it into words," she said, "but I've _felt_ it." He looked at her with dull foreboding. He had expected contradiction, not acquiescence. "Come," he said, rising and catching up the boat-cushion. "It's chilly here in the boat. Why did we come under these wet trees? Let's land, and go and sit in what's left of the sunset there." "You're not calmly confronting your fate," she said, smiling dimly. "Come." He held out his hand. She took it and laid her cheek against it. "I'll come with you," she said, "into the light or into the dark." "Child, child, what have I done to you?" He dropped the cushion in the bottom of the boat. She clung to him. He wavered, the boat rocked violently. "Be careful, it's deep here," she said, and drew him down on the cushion at her feet. "Val"--he averted his face--"you must try to understand. The barrier between you and me is a real one. It's not a question of whether your father's views were right or wrong, but that our imaginations have been infected by them. I, at least, would always be fearing, expecting disaster, and the fear would bring the evil to pass. Or even if it didn't, the fear would--would destroy us." "No, no!" "It's true. I have no courage equal to facing either my family inheritance, or my own dread of life--in a little child." He threw off her clinging hand. "_Think_ of any one feeling as I do about life, thrusting it on another--on some one I would love as I would love your--" He dropped his head and covered his eyes with his hand. "Why do you think always of some possible other person? Why do you never think of _me_?" she cried. He made a sudden movement, dropping his hand on the gunwale of the boat, and looking straight into her eyes, with something new in the mobile face, something that inundated, drowned her in one hot flush of passion. "Oh!" she cried, half closing her eyes, "do you care like that?" and she drooped forward into his open arms.