Before she realized what he would be about he swerved his horse toward her, his arm went around her suddenly. Taken completely off her guard she could make no resistance, indeed she scarcely knew what to expect until he crushed her to him and kissed her, almost roughly, full on the lips. "How dare you!" cried the girl, her face aflame, freeing herself at last, and swinging her own horse almost to the edge of the road which here ran on an excavation some fifty feet above the river. "How dare I?" laughed the audacious man, apparently no whit abashed by her indignation. "When I think of my opportunity I am amazed at my moderation." "Your opportunity, your moderation?" "Yes; when I had you helpless I took but one kiss, I might have held you longer and taken a hundred." "And by what right did you take that one?" haughtily demanded the outraged young woman, looking at him beneath level brows while the color slowly receded from her face. She had never been kissed by a man other than a blood relation in her life--remember, suspicious reader, that she was from Philadelphia--and she resented this sudden and unauthorized caress with every atom and instinct of her still somewhat conventional being. "But aren't you half-way engaged to me?" he pleaded in justification, seeing the unwonted seriousness with which she had received his impudent advance. "Didn't you agree to give me a chance?" "I did say that I liked you very much," she admitted, "no man better, and that I thought you might--" "Well, then--" he began. But she would not be interrupted. "I did not mean that you should enjoy all the privileges of a conquest before you had won me. I will thank you not to do that again, sir." "It seems to have had a very different effect upon you than it did upon me," replied the man fervently. "I loved you before, but now, since I have kissed you, I worship you." "It hasn't affected me that way," retorted the girl promptly, her face still frowning and indignant. "Not at all, and--" "Forgive me, Enid," pleaded the other. "I just couldn't help it. You were so beautiful I had to. I took the chance. You are not accustomed to our ways." "Is this your habit in your love affairs?" asked the girl swiftly and not without a spice of feminine malice. "I never had any love affairs before," he replied with a ready masculine mendacity, "at least none worth mentioning. But you see this is the west, we have gained what we have by demanding every inch that nature offers, and then claiming the all. That's the way we play the game out here and that's the way we win." "But I have not yet learned to play the 'game,' as you call it, by any such rules," returned the young woman determinedly, "and it is not the way to win me if I am the stake." "What is the way?" asked the man anxiously. "Show me and I'll take it no matter what its difficulty."