“You can't play with ME,” he muttered savagely, and kissed her again. “This is how I settle it. You've made me want you for mine. It's got to be love or--hate now. There isn't anything between, for me and you.” His eyes passed hungrily from her quivering lips to her eyes, and the glow within his own made her breath come faster. She struggled weakly to free herself, and his clasp only tightened jealously. “If you had hated me, you wouldn't have stopped back there, and spoken to me,” he said, the words coming in a rush. “Women like to play with love, I think. But you can't play with me. I want you. And I'm going to have you. Unless you hate me. But you don't. I'd stake my life on it.” And he kissed her again. Evadna reached up, felt for her hat, and began pulling it straight, and Good Indian, recalled to himself by the action, released her with manifest reluctance. He felt then that he ought never to let her go out of his arms; it was the only way, it seemed to him, that he could be sure of her. Evadna found words to express her thoughts, and her thoughts were as wholly conventional as was the impulse to straighten her hat. “We've only known each other a week!” she cried tremulously, while her gloved fingers felt inquiringly for loosened hairpins. “You've no right--you're perfectly horrid! You take everything for granted--” Good Indian laughed at her, a laugh of pure, elemental joy in life and in love. “A man's heart does not beat by the calendar. Nature made the heart to beat with love, ages before man measured time, and prattled of hours and days and weeks,” he retorted. “I'm not the same man I was a week ago. Nor an hour ago. What does it matter, I am--the man I am NOW.” He looked at her more calmly. “An hour ago,” he pointed out, “I didn't dream I should kiss you. Nor you, that you would let me do it.” “I didn't! I couldn't help myself. You--oh, I never saw such a--a brute!” The tears in her eyes were, perhaps, tears of rage at the swiftness with which he had mastered the situation and turned it in a breath from the safe channel of petty argument. She struck Huckleberry a blow with her whip which sent that astonished animal galloping down the slope before them, his ears laid back and his white eyelashes blinking resentment against the outrage.