A gardener who was watering some flowers, on a sign from Stuart hastened up the gravel walk and opened the door.

Every window commanded entrancing views of the bay and ocean. Every ship entering or leaving the harbour of New York must pass close and could be seen for miles going to sea.

When Stuart finally led Nan out on the broad veranda of the second floor, she was in a flutter of excitement over the perfection of its details.

"I think it's wonderful, Jim!" she exclaimed with enthusiasm. "I'd like to congratulate your friend on his good taste. And just look at those dear little terraces which lead down to the boathouse--on one of them a strawberry bed, on the other a garden, on the last a grape arbor, and then the boathouse, the wharf--and look--a lovely little boat tied to the float--it's just perfect!"

"And this outlook over bay and sea and towering hills--isn't it wonderful?" he asked soberly--"the hills and sea with their song of the infinite always ringing in one's soul!"

"It's glorious," she murmured. "I've never seen anything more nearly perfect. Whose is it?"

Stuart looked into her dark eyes with desperate yearning.

"It's yours, Nan!"

"Mine?"

"Yes, dear, this is my secret. I've been building this home for you the past year. I've put all the little money my father gave me with every dollar I could save. It's paid for and here's the key. I meant to ask you out here to fix our wedding day. I ask you now. Forget the nightmare of the past two weeks and remember only that we love each other!"

The girl's eyes grew dim for a moment and she turned away that the man who watched might not know. Her lips quivered for just an instant, and her hand gripped the rail of the veranda.

When she answered it was with a light banter in her tones that cut Stuart's heart with cruel pain.

"If I'd seen it four weeks ago, Jim, I really don't see how I could have resisted it--but now"--she shook her head and laughed--"now it's too late!"

"My God, don't say that, Nan!" he pleaded. "It's never too late to do right. You know that I love you. You know that you love me."

"But I've discovered," she went on with bantering, half challenging frankness, "that I love luxury, too. I never knew how deeply and passionately before--" she paused a moment, looking toward Sea-Gate.

"Isn't that the anchorage of the Atlantic Yacht Club?"

"Yes," he answered impatiently.

"Then that's Mr. Bivens's yacht--the big, ugly black one lying close inshore with steam up. He told me he would send her into dry dock to-day. He was talking last night of a wedding cruise in her to the Mediterranean. I confess, Jim, that I want to shine, to succeed, and dazzle, and reign. Every ambitious man has this desire. Why shouldn't I? You say I have rare beauty. Well, I wish to express myself. It's a question of common sense. Marriage is my only career. This man's conquest was so easy it startled me and I came down out of the clouds.

I don't know a girl in New York to-day who has youth and beauty who does not in her soul of souls aspire to the highest rank and the greatest wealth. This is perhaps the one chance of my life----"

"Do you hold yourself so cheap?"

"You see I'm not so prejudiced an observer as you, Jim. I've looked the facts squarely in the face. You can't realize how much the power of millions means to a woman who chafes at the limitations the world puts on her sex. My imagination has been set on fire by dreams of splendour and power. It's too late----"

"Don't, don't say it, Nan!"

"Why not be frank? This little cottage is a gem, I admit. But I've seen a splendid palace set in flowers and gleaming with subdued light. Soft music steals through its halls mingled with the laughter of throngs who love and admire me. Its banquet tables are laden with the costliest delicacies, while liveried servants hurry to and fro with plates and goblets of gold! And all this wild dream, Jim, seems real, a part of my very life. Perhaps somewhere in another world my spirit lived in such surroundings----"

"Perhaps," Stuart interrupted bitterly, "in the breast of a cruel, merciless half-savage princess who killed her lover to win a throne----"

Nan suddenly grasped his arm.

"What are you saying!"

"Only interpreting your dream."

"You mustn't say horrible things like that to me. It's bad enough, God knows, when I face it. But at least I'm not a murderess."

"I'm not at all sure," he persisted, with desperation. "That a girl who can deliberately kill the soul of the man who loves her, might not kill his body if put to the test----"

"For heaven's sake, Jim, if you do love me don't say such things! I'll never forget them! I can't help it--I've got to do this. The spell is on me, and I must----"

Stuart seized her arm with fierce strength that hurt.

"Then I'll break the spell. You shall not do this hideous thing. You are mine, I tell you, and I am bigger than money. I have the power to think, to create ideas, to create beauty--the power that remakes the world. I expect to have all the money we shall need. In the years to come we shall be rich whether we seek it or not. But the sweetest days of all life will be those in which we fight side by side the first battles of life in youth and poverty when we shall count the pennies and save with care for the little ones God may send us! With your sweet face bending above me and the touch of your hand, the highest success is sure. Marry me now. Here is your home. We don't need to be rich to be happy--a loving heart, generous sympathies, comradeship, high ambitions, strong young bodies and clean souls--and the angels will envy us!"

"But life is short, Jim! I can have things now. He has already promised them--a palace in town, another by the sea, a great castle in the heart of the blue southern mountains we used to watch as children, and armies of servants to do my bidding--I can live now!"

"And you call these trappings and tinsel life?"

"I want them."

"My God, Nan, haven't you a soul? Hasn't the life within no meaning for you? To me such luxury is sheer insanity. The possibilities of personal luxury have been exhausted thousands of years ago. It's commonplace, vulgar, and contemptible. If you wish for power why choose the lowest of all its forms? The way you are entering is worn bare by the feet of millions of forgotten fools whose bodies worms have eaten. Not one of them lives to-day even in a footnote of history. They sailed no unknown seas. They conquered no new worlds. They merely got dollars, spent them and died."

"And yet, Jim, you know as well as I do that money is the sign of success and power; its absence, of failure and weakness."

"To those who see the surface of things only--oh, Nan, why have you let this brood of black-winged bats build their nest in your heart?--this greed, this avarice, this envy of the rich----"

The girl lifted her hand with a gesture of impatience.

"You persist in misunderstanding me. Why should your desire for power be called high ambition, and mine a vulgar avarice? If you make a mistake in your career, you can correct it and begin again. Being a woman I cannot, for marriage is my only career. A mistake now would be to me fatal."

"And you are making the one tragic mistake no repentance can undo. You are choosing to commit the one unpardonable sin--the sin against the Spirit."

"And what, pray, is that?"

"The deliberate choice of evil, knowing it to be evil. Your heart is mine--mine, I tell you! Do you deny it?"

Again he seized her hand, gripped it fiercely, and looked into her eyes with tender, searching gaze.

Nan looked away.

"Oh, Nan, dear, believe me," he pleaded. "You can't deny this voice within the soul and live! Happiness is inside, not outside, dear. You say you want to own a castle on a mountain side. You can't do it by holding a deed and paying taxes on it. I can own it without a deed. I haven't a million, but I own this great city. This mighty harbour is mine. That's why I built our little home nest here on the hill overlooking it. It's all mine--these miles of shining ocean sands, the sea, and these landlocked waters. The great city that stretches northward, its miles of gleaming lights that will come out to-night and dim the stars, the hum and thrill of its life, the laughter and the tears, the joys and the fears--are all mine because I see and hear and feel and understand! Nor can the tax gatherer put his hand on my wealth. It's beyond his touch."

The girl's spirit was caught at last in the grip of his passionate appeal, and her rebellion ceased for the moment as she watched and listened with increasing sympathy.

"Beauty is always a thing of the soul, Nan," he rushed on. "The things we possess are signs of the spirit or we don't possess them--they possess us. The dress you wear expresses something within you when it fits your beautiful body so perfectly. The mere possession of houses and lands and things has no meaning unless they reveal _us_. If they merely express the labour of an ancestor, the mind of an architect or the genius of a manager, we are only intruders on the scene, not the creator and therefore the possessor of the beauty we aim at. A home, a dress, are symbols, or nothing but goods and chattels. I have seen you wear dresses made by your own hand that revealed a whole conception of life and hats that were poems. The dress you wear to-day is perfect because it expresses you. The clothes of a millionaire's wife have no meaning except conformity to fashion and the expenditure of vast sums of money. The poetic taste, the subtle mystery of personality which you put into your dress have always been a joy to me."

In spite of her fierce determination to give no response to his appeal her fingers instinctively tightened on the hand which had seized hers.

His own pressed with new courage and he went on.

"Bivens may think he owns that big black hulk lying out there belching smoke from her huge funnels. But he only pays the bills to keep her going. It takes fifty men to run her. I have a little sloop with a cabin for two. She cost me fifteen hundred dollars and I own her, because I dreamed every rib in her body, every rivet, every line of her graceful form. I created her and gave her a soul. I feel the beat of her proud little heart in the storm and the soft touch of her sleepy wings in the calm. She is part of the rhythm of my life.