It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent atmosphere—­with this woman beside him.  The deeper current of his thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms.  The wonder of Womanhood was ever-new to him.  Mighty gusts of animation surged through his body.  He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did not remember.  She could laugh charmingly....  To her, the Hour uprose.  Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved to be)—­to make her very own!...  She had taught herself to live by the hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long.  She knew the time would soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men.  It comes always to women who dissipate themselves among the many.  Yet she loved the love of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this promised to be.  Here was a big intact passion which she called unto herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her; this was a drug to die for.  It made her brave and filled her mind with dreams—­as wine does to some men.  Already he was giving her love—­of a sort that older men withhold from her kind.  She put her hand upon his wrist—­and told the native to drive them home.

...  They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the Block-House.  It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house.  There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn down.  She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they were alone, and she was building again.  There was wine.  Over the balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist....  The piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors.  The fragments were mellifluous....

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon.  He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in the main corral.  She laughed, but didn’t believe.  He was not the first to conceal his office from her.  It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous.  She did not ask a second time....  There was just one other perilous moment.  They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said: 

“You’re a dear boy!...  I haven’t kissed anyone like that—­oh, in long, long!...  It makes me feel like a woman—­how silly of me!”