"Because the pleasure of it has been demoralising."
"I don't believe in the demoralising effect of pleasure."
"Perhaps not. You are one of the virtuously constituted whose pleasure consists in behaving nicely. Mine doesn't."
Her hand went out in an impulsive gesture of denial.
"Why should you say that? You are not----"
"How can you know what I am?" he began bitterly, yet indifferently; his eyes, not upon her, but fixed far on the distant horizon, as if arraigning some unseen power which had made him what he was. Then he paused abruptly, and infinite surprise drove everything else from his face.
"Look!" he cried.
"Look?--what?--where?"
"Look!" His hand was on hers now, and its trembling touch seemed to give her sight.
It was a new heaven and a new earth! For, on the outermost edge of the world, the last beam of light from the sunken sun shot through the waves, flooding sky, and sea, and shore, with a green light, soft and pellucid as the heart of an emerald. But only for an instant. The next he had loosed her hand and the light was gone.