At once he loosened his hold, and gazed moodily at her small fingers on which two or three superb diamond circlets glittered like drops of dew. "Your rings!" he said--"Yes--I forgot them! Wonderful rings!--emblems of your inordinate vanity and vulgar wealth--I forgot them! How they sparkle in this wide moonlight, don't they? Just a drifting of nature's refuse matter, turned into jewels for women! Strange ordinance of strange elements! There!" and he let her hands go free--"They are not injured, nor are you." She was silent pouting her under-lip like a spoilt child, and rubbing one finger where a ring had dinted her flesh. "So you actually think I have come here to get away from YOU?" he went on--"Well for once your ineffable conceit is mistaken. You think yourself a personage of importance--but you are nothing,--less than nothing to me, I never give you a thought--I have come here to study--to escape from the crazy noise of modern life--the hurtling to and fro of the masses of modern humanity,--I want to work out certain problems which may revolutionise the world and its course of living--" "Why revolutionise it?" she interrupted--"Who wants it to be revolutionised? We are all very well as we are--it's a breeding place and a dying place--voila tout!" She gave a French shrug of her shoulder and waved her hands expressively. Then she pushed back her flowing hair,--the moonbeams trickled like water over it, making a network of silver on gold. "What did you come here for?" he asked, abruptly. "To see you!" she answered smilingly--"And to tell you that I'm 'on the war-path' as they say, taking scalps as I go. This means that I'm travelling about,--possibly I may go to Europe--" "To pick up a bankrupt nobleman!" he suggested. She laughed. "Dear, no! Nothing quite so stupid! Neither noblemen nor bankrupts attract me. No! I'm doing a scientific 'prowl,' like you. I believe I've discovered something with which I could annihilate you--so!" and she made a round O of her curved fingers and blew through it--"One breath!--from a distance, too! and hey presto!--the bear-man on the hills of California eating bread and milk is gone!--a complete vanishing trick--no more of him anywhere!" The bear-man, as she called him, gloomed upon her with a scowl. "You'd better leave such things alone!" he said, angrily--"Women have no business with science." "No, of course not!" she agreed--"Not in men's opinion. That's why they never mention Madame Curie without the poor Monsieur! SHE found radium and he didn't,--but 'he' is always first mentioned." He gave an impatient gesture. "Enough of all this!" he said--"Do you know it's nearly ten o'clock at night?--I suppose you do know!--and the people at the Plaza--"