She did not mention Hume again. She admitted frankly that she herself disliked the man although she had tried to think well of him because he was a friend of her father. Running on with the account of her winter adventures, and laughing at the memory of an incident that had been serious enough at the time, she told him how she had imperilled her life in heedless pursuit of the snow-shoe rabbit. Her mood, gay for the moment, was the sort to make light of things which had merely cast a shadow and gone; it was as though from the very presence of Wayne she had accepted his theory of life, the ability to live keenly, richly in the present, to be oblivious with sealed eyes to the future, careless with deaf ears to the mutterings of the past. She was talking freely, spontaneously, laughing from the very joy of life and the morning and another joy which she did not analyse, looking down at the sunlight caught flaring in his hair. And he, vastly contented, listened and laughed with her. Then, in the midst of the recital of her last winter's mishap which she strove to make as unimportant as she now considered it, she looked down at Wayne Shandon and suddenly broke off in the middle of a word. He had dropped his cigarette, the hand that she could see had shut tight into a whitened fist, the colour of a second ago had seeped out of his bronzed cheek. As she stopped, wondering, he sprang to his feet and towered over her. "Wanda!" he cried, and his voice was as unfamiliar in her ears as the view of his drawn face in her eyes. "Wayne!" she said curiously, staring at him, startled and a little afraid of she knew not what. "Wayne! What is it?" "What is it?" Shandon's voice had dropped lower, was so hoarse that it did not seem Wayne Shandon's voice at all. "It is just this--" He broke off as sharply as she had done and moving swiftly as though driven by some great compelling force which dominated him he stooped and swept her up into his arms. She felt the tightening muscles as he drew her close, closer to him; felt a little tremor running through his whole body; heard the beating of his heart; was drawn nearer to him than she had ever been drawn to a man in her life; realised for the first time in a flutter of many sweeping emotions how superbly big and powerful the man was, how almost god-like in the beauty of his muscular manhood . . . and then she knew nothing but the wonderful fact that he had kissed her full upon her quivering red mouth.