At last she pulled away, a trifle dazed with the force of his passion. His lips fell lower, kissing her shoulder, her arm, the hand squeezing the taut ball of her handkerchief. As she took even this from him, he fell to his knees beside her, pressing long kisses on the handkerchief, any symbol to satisfy the aching hunger of his body. She watched him in wonder. Her hand faltered out and pressed back the damp hair from his forehead. "You poor boy! You poor, starved boy!" The paroxysm over, he sat at her feet, moodily watching the lower reaches of the valley. He realized the breach of faith with Jane; but there was a perverse part of him that rejoiced at the duplicity. The other love was chaste, beside this; after all, he could love more than one woman.... Should he stop with one wrenched rose, when the bush was on fire with red beauty? Again he sat beside her. "You know, Louise," he urged tentatively, enough withdrawn from the scene to study her reaction to his conduct, "I've been straight with women.... You are the only girl I have kissed in a year." It trembled on her tongue to say that he had made up for lost time; no, that would sound too flippant. "I know, I know," her answer rang rich with soft understanding. It was the next night that she reverted to the matter, the fluent voluptuousness of her body still tingling from the harsh tenderness of his arms. "You're a funny boy.... What you said last night...." "I said so much!" Her thought could not be laughed away. "About your keeping straight, you know.... I have a friend--she only married last Mardi Gras--who always insisted she wanted a man who had had experience.... Girls have queer notions, haven't they?" "I should think the girl would feel soiled ... that way. I should hate to have my mind filled, on my wedding night, comparing the wonderful girl I had won ... with ... other women I had had." The perverse infidelity shook him again. "And yet I kiss." He turned the word into fact. "There's no logic in it," he persisted, his body eased with the lip-contact. "Kissing shouldn't be wasted, any more than the rest. It's only a prelude to the more wonderful finale...." "I enjoy the prelude," she temporized, in lazy content. "And afterwards----" he breathed on his hand pausing fearfully on the tantalizing silken softness of her cool ankle, then straying with restrained gusto toward the edge of the lacy fabric above. "No," she smiled. He solaced an obedient spirit with the touch of the denying lips. The next afternoon he never forgot. They started early for Shadow Mountain, promising the Tollivers to return with mountain azalea, if it was still blooming. She dismissed this as an excuse. Over the iron bridge curving above Shadow Creek's muddy bluster they hummed, and then up the hill. They left the car in the shade of a sandy lane, and clambered up the steep intricacies of sandstone, to a wide table-rock slipped from the hoary buttresses above. Beyond this were the azaleas.