Nathan recounted what had ensued in his home following Carol’s departure. The girl was already acquainted with the sordid injustices done the boy. “Served him right!” she snapped pertly. “Personally I think your father’s a little bit ‘off’!” “Let’s forget it,” responded Nathan. “Let’s just talk about ourselves.” And he breathed a happy sigh. Parents and guardians were sleeping, like all the world about them. The night and its hours belonged to themselves. “Carrie,” said the boy—thickly, softly—as they moved slowly through infinite reaches of happiness, deep-toned, voluptuous with the spell of springtime, “I want to tell you something.” “Yes, Natie!” The boy’s arm was about her warm, yielding, corsetless waist. Instinctively it tightened. “Carrie—dear! I—love you!!” He had never said it in plain words before. His heart leaped with the admission. The hour, the vastness of their freedom, acted upon his self-conscious ego as an opiate. He was the eternal lover. The girl hung her head. She pressed her arm against the hand which held her tightly. Laughing nervously, she returned: “I love you too, Natie, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No girl would trust herself out with a fellow so, unless she loved him—very much. Isn’t that right?” “You know you can trust me, dear.” “I don’t know as I’m thinking very much about it, Natie. There’s a point where a girl doesn’t care, you know, when she loves a fellow very much.” They covered a quarter mile in silence. Far out beyond the Cogswell place was an abandoned pile of weather-grayed lumber. It was half hidden under brambles and wild grape. Nat and the girl reached this pile. Behind it the Cogswell wood lot reared like an enchanted forest, Stygian dark, peri haunted. Across the road, a pasture of sumach and blueberry fell away to the lower shores of a choked and stagnant pond. The hour was too late for the frog chorus to pipe down in this bogland. But occasionally up across the pasture came a single plaintive note or the dull, lugubrious “gut-a-chunk” of a philosophic bullfrog. Once very far away they heard a whippoorwill. They sat down on this pile of lumber, its weather-spiced fiber even more fragrant than the shrubs and sod around them. Darkness hid scarlet faces. Nathan took the girl on his lap. Their lips met. Carol resigned herself with a happy quiver. She lay in his powerful young arms like a tired child and blinked at him owlishly in the weird moonlight. “I think, Natie,” she whispered, “I think—I love you more—than I ever dreamed I could love any man—even back in A-higher.” Her weight began to numb the boy’s limbs. Yet he could not disturb her; she was a wonderful burden. Hairpins bothered where her head rested against his shoulder. With her left hand she pulled them out. She shook her riotous chestnut tresses free and they fell about her oval face like the bacchanal crown of a Sybarite. The lad bent his head and buried his lips in them.