Penton Baxter stepped in my way, took hold of one of my hands in both of his.... "Please, Johnnie, please, dear friend ... I wish you to stay while I myself go. Finish reading the poem to Hildreth ... I think I have been too harsh in my judgment of both of you ... only please do be more discreet, if only for appearance's sake, in the future.... "Sit down where you were. I wish to show that I trust you both.... "Good-night, Hildreth!" and he kissed his wife in fond contrition. "Good-night, Johnnie ... forgive me!" And he wavered out at the door, his face set in pain. * * * * * As soon as he had gone I rose swiftly. "And now I must go." "If you men aren't the funniest things!" she caught me by the hand, detaining me ... "not yet ... wait a minute. Read more of that poem you began, if only for a blind." I picked up the book, started reading again ... strangely a rush of tears flooded my eyes and blurred the type.... I began to sob, heart-sick. I did love the absurd little man. My heart ached, broken over my lies.... "Oh! Oh!" I sobbed, "Hildreth, my woman, my sweetheart--he trusted me, Hildreth ... he trusted me!" I knelt by the bed, thrusting my head into the lap of my First Woman. She kissed me on top of the head. "You're both two big, silly babies, that's all you are." * * * * * It was dawn when I returned to my tent, pulled the flap aside, fell, exhausted, on my cot in dreamless sleep.... * * * * * How was it all going to end? It seemed to me that I had tapped violent, subterranean currents in life and passion, that I had not hitherto known existed.... Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination! The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox, radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman! * * * * * Hildreth and I, a-field, had found a bed of that exceptionally poisonous mushroom named _Pallida_ something or other ... the book said its poison was kin to that of the poison in the rattlesnake's bite. My eyes met with Hildreth's ... we needed say no word, both thinking the same thought that frightened us!... "how easy it would be--!" * * * * * Now we were plumbing the darker side of passion. Something that Carpenter does not write of in his _Love's Coming of Age_. * * * * * A night of wind, shifting into rain. Hildreth I knew would be afraid, alone. I stepped into her cottage, in my bath-robe. She almost screamed at my sudden appearance. For I came in at the door like a shadow, the wind and rain making such a tumult that a running horse would not have been heard.