He sighed ruefully. "Oh, yes, it did! That temptation, too, I had to fight. For you see, my dear, I don't believe in marriage. I've seen too much of it (vicariously). Believe me, it preserves no flares! It quenches them. The thing's as fatal as death--though not, thank God, as inevitable! I will not put a relation I value to a test it will not bear," he explained, evidently in earnest. "What!--tie a creature of spirit and fire like yourself to the duty of forever loving one man, obeying one man, giving yourself into his hands to break at his leisure? Can you think of any surer way of killing love than to make a duty of it? 'Duty'--the most hideous, cold, Puritanical word in our hideous, cold, Puritanical language! The French put it better. _Devoir_ suggests something that is by no means cold. Therefore, dearest girl"--he kissed her hands--"let me pay you my _devoirs_ always, and be sure that I shall never trouble you with anything so unpleasant as a 'duty.'--Why, suppose I had taken you then, bound you hand and foot to me by law--think how bored we should be with each other already! It would be from me you would be taking a vacation, instead of from the unfortunate Blair." (Joan winced.) "As it is--" "Well?" she prompted, veiling her eyes. "As it is--Eduard?" He drew her toward him with little inarticulate murmurs. She took a fleeting glance at the face approaching hers. It was flushed, the eyes a trifle glazed as if he had been drinking. He breathed hard. "How unbecoming it is to them!" she thought, but without resisting. (The reader who happens to like Joan would do well to skip this paragraph. It is not our heroine at her best.) "As it is," said Eduard rather hoarsely, "we have each other for all time, my Beautiful! Nothing to bind us, nothing to hold us, except our sacred--er--" "Flare?" prompted Joan, helpfully. But he was not paying his usual attention to words just then. He lifted her face to his, and closed his eyes the better to savor what was coming.... An unexpected sound caused him to open them again. It was laughter, issuing from the very lips he was about to enjoy; not hysterical, nervous laughter such as might have been pardoned under the circumstances, but cool and sweet, and unimpassioned as the tinkling of ice in a pitcher. "You're not really trying to warm it up and serve it over again?" protested Joan, as she extricated herself from his embrace. "How absurd! I thought you were too much of an artist for that. And at your age, too!" She sauntered back to the others, still laughing over her shoulder. He did not follow. Which may be said to have been the end of Eduard Desmond, so far as this chronicle is concerned.... But it was also the end of what Joan had disloyally spoken of to him as her vacation. The word stuck in her memory, and she was ashamed of it. Her heart yearned toward Archie.