The Secret Power

A laugh, clear and cold as a sleigh-bell on a frosty night rang out on the silence.

"Why did you run away from me?"

He replied at once, and brusquely.

"Because I was tired of you!"

She laughed again. A strange white elf as she looked In the spreading moonbeams she was woman to the core, and the disdainful movement of her small uplifted head plainly expressed her utter indifference to his answer.

"I followed you"--she said--"I knew I should find you! What are you doing up here? Shamming to be ill?"

"Precisely! 'Sham' is as much in my line as yours. I have to 'pretend' in order to be real!"

"Paradoxical as usual!" and she shrugged her shoulders--"Anyway you've chosen a good place to do your shamming in. It's quite lovely up here,--much better than the Plaza. I am at the Plaza."

"Automobile and all I suppose!" he said, sarcastically--"How many servants?--how many boxes with how many dresses?"

She laughed again.

"That's no concern of yours!" she replied--"I am my own mistress."

"More's the pity!" he retorted.

They faced each other. The moon, now soaring high in clear space, shed a luminous rain of silver over all the visible breadth of wild country, and their two figures looked mere dark silhouettes half drowned in the pearly glamour.

"It's worth travelling all the long miles to see!" she declared, stretching her arms out with an enthusiastic gesture--"Oh, beautiful big moon of California! I'm glad I came!"

He was silent.

"You are not glad!" she continued--"You are a bear-man in hiding, and the moon says nothing to you!"

"It says nothing because it IS nothing"--he answered, impatiently--"It is a dead planet without heart,--a mere shell of extinct volcanoes where fire once burned, and its light is but the reflection of the sun on its barren surface. It is like all women,--but mostly like YOU!"

She made him a sweeping curtsy so exquisitely graceful that the action resembled nothing so much as the sway of a lily in a light wind.

"Thanks, gentle Knight!--flower of chivalry!" she said--"I see you love me in spite of yourself!"

He made a quick stride towards her,--then stopped. "Love you!" he echoed,--then laughed loudly and derisively-"Great God! Love you? YOU? If I did I should be mad! When will you learn the truth of me?--that women are less in my estimation than the insects crawling on a blade of grass or spawning in a stagnant pond?--that they have no power to move me to the smallest pulse of passion or desire?--and that you, of all your sex, seem to my mind the most--"