“Do you love me very much?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, so much,” she answered with passionate emphasis.  “You are so beautiful.  Never have I seen any one so beautiful, and so tall and so strong.  Oh, it is pain to me to love you so much.”

And indeed she became quite white, as she drew her hand from mine and clasped both of hers upon her breast as if to still some agony there.

My own heart beat hard.  The grey wood seemed to lose its ashy tone and become warm and rosy round us.  I bent over her and took her up wholly in my arms, and she laughed and threw hers around me in wild delight.

“Carry me, Treevor, over the bridge and up the slope at the side.  It is so nice to feel you carrying me.”

It was no difficulty to carry her, and the waves of electricity from her joyous little soul rushed through me till my arms and all the veins of my body seemed alight and burning.

I ran with her, over the narrow bridge and up the slope, where, as she said, there was drier ground.  And there, on a bed of leaves under some tangled branches, I fell on my knees with her still clasped to my breast, and covered her small satin-skinned face with kisses.

“I am yours now.  You must not let me go.  I only want to look and look at your face.  I wish I could tell you how I love you.  Oh, Treevor, I can’t tell you....”

As I looked down, breathless with running and kisses and the fires she had kindled within me, I saw how her bosom heaved beneath the yellow jacket, how all the delicate curves of her breast seemed broken up with panting sighs and longing to express in words all that her body expressed so much better.

“Darling, there is no need to tell me.  I know.”  And I put my hand round her soft column of throat, feeling all its quick pulses throbbing hard into the palm of my hand.

“Put your head down on my heart, Treevor.  Lie down beside me; now let us think we have drunk a little opium, just a little, and we are going to sleep through a long night together.  Hush!  What is that?  Did you hear anything?”

She lifted my hand from her throat and sat up, listening.

I had not heard anything.  I had been too absorbed.  All had vanished now from me, except the fervent beauty of the girl before me.

The sea of desire had closed over my head, sealing the senses to outside things; I drew her towards me impatiently.

“It is nothing,” I murmured.  “I heard nothing.”  But she sat up, gazing straight across a small cleared space in front of us to where the impenetrable thicket of undergrowth again stood forward like grey screens between the twisted tree trunks.

“Yes, there was something; there, opposite!  Look, something is moving!” I followed her eyes and saw a strand of loose moss quiver and heard a twig break in the quiet round us.  We both watched the undergrowth across the open space intently.  For a second nothing moved, then the boughs parted in front of us, and through the great lichen streamers and rugged bands of grey-green moss depending from them, peered an old, drawn-looking face.