quite calm, only a little
breathless. He was neither snarling nor smiling now. He took Sheila very
gently by the wrists, drawing her hands down from her face, and he put
her arms at their full length behind her, holding them there.

"You meet Dickie here when you're through work, dream-girl," he said
gently. "You kiss Dickie when you leave my Aura, you little beacon light.
I've kept my hands off you and my lips off you and my mind off you,
because I thought you were too fine and good for anything but my ideal.
And all this while you've been sneaking up here to Dickie and Jim and
Lord knows who else besides. Now, I am agoin' to kiss you and then you
gotta get out of Millings. Do you hear? After I've kissed you, you ain't
good enough for my purpose--not for mine."

Gathering both her hands in one of his, he put the hard, long fingers of
his free hand back of her head, holding it from wincing or turning and
his mouth dropped upon hers and seemed to smother out her life. She
tasted whiskey and the blood from his cut lips.

"You won't tell _me_, anyway, that lie again," he panted, keeping his
face close, staring into her wide eyes of a horrified childishness--"that
you've never been kissed."

Again his lips fastened on her mouth. He let her go, strode to the door,
unlocked it, and went out.

She had fallen to the floor, her head against the chair. She beat the
chair with her hands, calling softly for her father and for her God. She
reproached them both. "You told me it was a good old world," she sobbed.
"You told me it was a good old world."

CHAPTER XV

FLAMES

A hot, dry day followed on the cool dawn. In his room Dickie lay across
his bed. The sun blazed in at his single long window; the big flies that
had risen from the dirty yard buzzed and bumped against the upper pane
and made aimless, endless, mazy circles above and below one another in
the stifling, odorous atmosphere. Dickie lay there like an image of
Icarus, an eternal symbol of defeated youth; one could almost see about
his slenderness the trailing, shattered wings. He had wept out the first
shock of his anger and his shame; now he lay in a despairing stupor. His
bruised face burned and ached; his chest felt tight with the aching and
burning of his heart. Any suspicion of his father's interpretation of his
presence in Sheila's room was mercifully spared him, but the knowledge
that he had been brutally jerked back from her pure and patient lips, h