"Empty nutshells are a very good description of men who come after a woman for her money"--she observed, placidly--"and it's quite natural that the woman should throw them over her shoulder. There's nothing in them--not even a flavour! No--never fooled you,--you fooled yourself--you are fooling yourself now, only you don't know it. But there!--let's finish talking! I like the romance of the situation--you in your shirt-sleeves on a hill in California, and I in silken stuff and diamonds paying you a moonlight visit--it's really quite novel and charming!--but it can't go on for ever! Just now you said you wanted me to know a thing or two, and I presume you have explained yourself. What you think or what you don't think about women doesn't interest me. I'm one of the 'wastes on the wind!' _I_ shall not aid in the continuation of the race,--heaven forbid! The race is too stupid and too miserable to merit continuance. Everything has been done for it that can be done, over and over again, from the beginning--till now,--and now--NOW!" She paused, and despite himself the tone of her voice sent a thrill through his blood of something like fear. "NOW?--well! What NOW?" he demanded. She lifted one hand and pointed upwards. Her face in the moonbeams looked austere and almost spectral in outline. "Now--the Change!" she answered--"The Change when all things shall be made new!" A silence followed her words,--a strange and heavy silence. It was broken by her voice hushed to an extreme softness, yet clearly audible. "Good-night!--good-bye!" He turned impatiently away to avoid further leave-taking--then, on a sudden impulse, his mood changed. "Morgana!" The call echoed through emptiness. She was gone. He called again,--the long vowel in the strange name sounding like "Mor-ga-ar-na" as a shivering note on the G string of a violin may sound at the conclusion of a musical phrase. There was no reply. He was--as he had desired to be,--alone. CHAPTER III "She left New York several weeks ago,--didn't you know it? Dear me!--I thought everybody was convulsed at the news!" The speaker, a young woman fashionably attired and seated in a rocking chair in the verandah of a favourite summer hotel on Long Island, raised her eyes and shrugged her shoulders expressively as she uttered these words to a man standing near her with a newspaper in his hand. He was a very stiff-jointed upright personage with iron grey hair and features hard enough to suggest their having been carved out of wood. "No--I didn't know it"--he said, enunciating his words in the deliberate dictatorial manner common to a certain type of American--"If I had I should have taken steps to prevent it." "You can't take steps to prevent anything Morgana Royal decides to do!" declared his companion. "She's a law to herself and to nobody else. I guess YOU couldn't stop her, Mr. Sam Gwent!"