It was after lunch that Randy and Becky walked in the woods. Nellie Custis followed them. They sat down at last at the foot of a hickory tree. Becky took off her hat and the wind blew her shining hair about her face. She was pale and wore an air of deep preoccupation. "Randy," she asked suddenly out of a long silence, "did you ever kiss a girl?" Her question did not surprise him. He and Becky had argued many matters. And they usually plunged in without preliminaries. He fancied that Becky was discussing kisses in the abstract. It never occurred to him that the problem was personal. "Yes," he said, "I have. What about it?" "Did you--ask her to marry you?" "No." "Why not?" He pulled Nellie Custis' ears. "One of them wasn't a nice sort of girl--not the kind that I should have cared to introduce to--you." "Yet you cared to--kiss her?" Randy flushed faintly. "I know how it looks to you. I hated it afterwards, but I couldn't marry a girl--like that----" "Who was the other girl?" For a moment he did not reply, then he said with something of an effort, "It was you, Becky." "Me? When?" She turned on him her startled gaze. "Do you remember at Christmas--oh, ten years ago--and your grandfather had a party for you. There was mistletoe in the hall, and we danced and stopped under the mistletoe----" "I remember, Randy--how long ago it seems." "Yet ten years isn't really such a long time, is it, Becky? I was only a little boy, but I told myself then that I would never kiss any other girl. I thought then that--that some day I might ask you to marry me. I--I had a wild dream that I might try to make you love me. I didn't know then that poverty is a millstone about a man's neck." He gave a bitter laugh. Becky's breath came quickly. "Oh, Randy," she said, "poverty wouldn't have had anything to do with it--not if we had--cared----" "I care," said Randy, "and I think the first time I knew how much I cared was when I kissed that other girl. Somehow you came to me that night, a little white thing, so fine and different, and I loathed her." He was standing now--tall and lean and black-haired, but with the look of race on his thin face, a rather princely chap in spite of his shabby clothes. "Of course you don't care," he said; "I think if I had money I should try to make you. But I haven't the right. I had thought that, perhaps, if no other man came that some time I might----" Becky picked up her riding crop, and as she talked she tapped her boot in a sort of staccato accompaniment. "That other man has come," _tap-tap_, "he kissed me," _tap-tap_, "and made me love him," _tap-tap_, "and he has gone away--and he hasn't asked me to marry him." One saw the Indian in Randy now, in the lifted head, the square-set jaw, the almost cruel keenness of the eyes. "Of course it is George Dalton," he said. "Yes." "I could kill him, Becky." She laughed, ruefully. "For what? Perhaps he thinks I'm not a nice sort of girl--like the one you kissed----"