ce. Still his grasp tightened upon her hand, drew it toward
him. "In Greenstream," he continued, "men don't like me, they are afraid
of me; but the women make me unhappy--they tell me their troubles; I don't
want them to, I keep away from them."

"I understand that," she declared eagerly, "I would tell you anything."

"You are different; I want you to tell me ... things. But the things I
want to hear may not come to you. I would never be satisfied with a
little. The Makimmons are all that way--everything or nothing."

She gently loosened her hand, and stood up, facing him. Her countenance,
turned to the light, shone like a white flame; it was tensely aquiver with
passionate earnestness, lambent with the flowering of her body, of dim
desire, the heritage of flesh. She spoke in a voice that startled Gordon
by its new depth, the brave thrill of its undertone.

"I could only give all," she said. "I am like that too. What do you wish
me to tell you? What can I say that will help you?"

"Ever since I first saw you going to the Stenton school," he hurried on,
"I have thought about you. I could hardly wait for the Christmas holidays,
to have you in the stage, or for the summer when you came home. Nobody
knows; it has been a secret ... it seemed so useless. You were like
a ... a star," he told her.

"How could I know?" she asked; "I was only a girl until--until
Buckley ... until to-night, now. But I can never be that again, something
has happened ... in my heart, something has gone, and come," her voice
grew shadowed, wistful. It carried to him, in an intangible manner, a
fleet warning, as though something immense, unguessed, august, uttered
through Lettice Hollidew the whisper of a magnificent and terrible menace.
He felt again as he had felt as a child before the vast mystery of night.
An impulse seized him to hurry away from the portico, from the youthful
figure at his side; a sudden, illogical fear chilled him. But he summoned
the hardihood, the skepticism, of his heart; he defied--while the sinking
within him persisted--not the girl, but the nameless force beyond, above,
about them. "You are like a star," he repeated, in forced tones.

He rose and stood before her. She swayed toward him like a flower bowed by
the wind. He put his arms around her, her head lay back, and he kissed the
smooth fullness of her throat. He kissed her lips.

The eternal, hapless cry of the whippoorwills throbbed on his hearing. The
moon slip