She turned and walked to the end of the pergola, fifty feet away.  There she threw up a clenched fist and began to emit groans, cries of hoarse rage and ragged phrases of abuse.  She was again rehearsing her lines in the mob scene of the equal-suffrage play.  At the head of her fellow mobs-women, she hurled harsh epithets at the Prime Minister of the oldest English-speaking nation on earth.  There seemed to be no escape for the Prime Minister.  They had him.

“We’ve broken windows, we’ll break heads!” shouted the Demon, and a gardener crossing the grounds might have been seen to quicken his pace after one backward look.

The pair on the bench were inattentive.  They had instinctively drawn together, but they were silent.  In Bean’s mind was a confusion of many matters:  Breede sleeping under a counter—­people in log-cabins getting married—­the best coon-dog in York State—­a yoke of nice fat steers—­

But beneath this was a sharpened consciousness of the girl breathing at his side.  She seemed curiously to be waiting—­waiting!  The silence and their stillness became unbearable.  Something must break ... their breaths were too long drawn.  He got to his feet and the flapper was unaccountably standing beside him.  It was too dark to see her face, but he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was bent.  And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge, he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing her with a simple directness that “Napoleon, Man and Lover,” could never have bettered.

There is no record of Napoleon having studied jiu-jitsu.

For one frenzied moment he was out of himself, a mere conquering male, unthinking, ruthless, exigent.  Then the sweet strange touch of her cheek brought him back to the awful thing he had done.  His reason worked with a lightning quickness.  Terrified by his violence she would wrench herself free and run screaming to the house.  And then—­it was too horrible!

He waited, breathless, for retribution.  The flapper did not wrench herself away.  Slowly he relaxed the embrace that had made a brute of him.  The flapper had not screamed.  She was facing him now, breathless herself.  He put her a little way from him; he wanted her to see it as he did.

The flapper drew a long and rather catchy breath, then she adjusted a strand of hair misplaced by his violence.

“I knew it!” she began, in tones surprisingly cool.  “I knew it ever so long ago, from the very first moment!”

He tried to speak, but had no words.  His utterance was formless.  “When did you first know?” she persisted.  She was patting her hair into place with both hands.

He didn’t know; he didn’t know that he knew now; but recalling her speech he had overheard, he had the presence of mind to commit a soulful perjury.

“From the very first,” he lied glibly.  “Something went over me—­just like that.  I can’t tell you how, but I knew!”