Their unhappy plight was intensified by the fact that their characters had deepened and broadened alike during the years of separation. The boy and girl attachment of those heedless days in Colorado might not have withstood the strain of being thrown together again constantly after so long an interval, if the woman's nature had not advanced step by step with the man's. Experience of life, and the educative influences of foreign travel and good society, had done for Nancy what quiet study and seclusion from his fellow-men had done for Power. By such widely different paths they had reached a common standard of earnest purpose and high resolve, and Nancy, at any rate, was passionately determined not to sacrifice the remainder of her youth because of the unhallowed compact which sold her to gilded misery and robbed her of her one true mate in all the world. As she did not blink the consequences, there remained but to carry through her desperate scheme as speedily and quietly as was compatible with no risk of failure. Her one difficulty lay with Power himself. She had first to break down his sense of honor, a task which could be accomplished only by making him see clearly that her life's happiness was at stake. And she knew him, oh, so well--far better than he knew himself! Let Derry once find tears in her eyes, tears which he alone could dispel, and the seeming fortress of his self-control would crumble into dust. Let her once twine her arms around him, and what man-made laws would wrench them apart? For, by her reasoning, the solemn ordinances which govern frail human nature were wholly on her side. If marriage were, indeed, a divine institution, its very essence was profaned when Hugh Marten laid his sorry plan and made it effective by sheer force of money. She, the woman, would be called on to pay for her liberty in the coin minted of ill-repute, that base metal for whose currency her sex was mainly responsible. But those friends whom she valued would hear the truth, and they would rally round her, never fear! Why, in this delightful island, where pain and anguish seemed to be banished by the imperious ukase of deities presiding over the revels of the rich, people recognized as leaders of society had passed already through a furnace of scandal and scathing exposure such as she and her lover would never be called upon to face. And that was why Power was at once bewildered and raised to the seventh heaven by her confident, contented smile when they met among the crowd of merrymakers on the yacht, or exchanged a few commonplace words when doing the round of Narragansett Bay and at dinner that evening in one of Newport's summer palaces. As his dog-cart was in waiting, he had no excuse to escort her home, but, in saying goodnight, she contrived again to perplex and delight him by a whispered request.