A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. "The cutting-women and their men," she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers and winters, drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction. Doubtless, they came from the women's camp at Judge Tiffany's. The night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm. She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation. She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke. "No, I won't hurt you," he said, "I'm as gentle a little kisser as you ever saw." The voice was that of Bert Chester. "Aw, you're too fresh," came the voice of the girl. But as they drew into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him. "Fresh as a daisy!" said the voice of Bertram Chester. Followed a struggle, a faint "stop, stop!" in the voice of the girl, the sound of gross and heavy kissing. In a moment, the white form of the girl broke down the road, the greater, darker form of the man lumbering after. He caught her, held her for a longer time and a lesser struggle. She came out of this one laughing, and down the road they went, his arm a black shadow about her waist. Eleanor's deeper and higher self--the self that lay like a filmy, impalpable wrapper about her conscious mind, so that at times she appeared to herself as two persons--that consciousness stood aloof in expectation of disgust, revulsion, horror. It came as a confused surprise that she felt nothing of the kind. A cloying sweetness, a sensation purely physical, as though a syrup had been poured into all the channels of her nerves, began in her throat, rushed through body and limbs. The sweet tide surged backward, beat in a wave of faintness upon her heart. Shame, like air into a vacuum, followed with a rush. She sank to the ground, clinging to the bench. When she had so far mastered herself that she could feel her own senses, she was praying aloud--praying in the rite which held her emotions while it failed with her reason. "Ave Maria Sanctissima!" she was saying over and over again. CHAPTER V "Match you to see whether it's good, old fifteen cent feed at the Marseillaise or a four bit bust at the Nevada," said Bertram Chester. "I'll take you," responded Mark Heath, flipping a silver dollar as he spoke. "Heads the Nevada; tails the croutons and Dago red."