"If you care so much...." A little spiral of wind rising fountain-wise out of the breathlessness whirled up a smother of brightening leaves; it caught my skirts and whipped them against his knees. It seemed to have blown our hands together too, though I am at a loss to know how that was. "Care!" he said. "If I care? Oh, you beauty, you wonder!" All at once he had kissed me. The electrical moment hung in the air, poised, took flight upward in dizzying splendour. Suddenly from within the wood came a little snigger of laughter. CHAPTER IX I do not know how long it took for the certainty that I had been kissed by an utter stranger in the presence of the entire picnic, to work through the singing flames in which that kiss had wrapped me. We must have walked on almost immediately in the direction of the snigger; I remember a kind of clutch of my spirit toward the mere mechanical act of walking, to hold me fast to the time and place from which there was an inward rush to escape. We walked on. They were all sitting together under a bank of hazel and the girls' laps were filled with the brown clusters. Out of my whirling dimness I heard Helmeth Garrett explaining, as I introduced him, how he had come across me in the wood, looking for them. "And of course," suggested Charlie Gower, "in such good company you weren't in a hurry about looking for the rest of us." I remembered the asparagus bed and was glad I had slapped him. "No," my companion looked him over very coolly, "now that I've seen some of the rest of you I'm glad I didn't hurry." Plainly it wasn't going to do to try to take it out of Helmeth Garrett. As we began by common consent to move back to the spring, Forester drew me by the arm behind the hazel. He was divided between a brotherly disgust at my lapse, and delight to have caught the prim Olivia tripping. "Well," he exclaimed, "you _have_ done it!" Considering what I knew of Forester's affairs this was unbearable. "Oh! it isn't for _you_ to talk----" "What I want to know is, whether I am to thrash him or not?" "Thrash him?" I wondered. "For getting you talked about ... off there in the woods all afternoon!" "We weren't----" I began, but suddenly I saw the white bolls of the sycamores redden with the westering sun; we must have been three hours covering what was at most a half hour's walk. "Don't be vulgar, Forester," I went on, with my chin in the air. "Oh, well," was my brother's parting shot, "I don't know as I ought to make any objection, seeing you didn't."