hed faint in its every caress.

Night could hardly come fast enough, after the next long day. A
hundred times during that day she reminded herself, while the slow,
majestic sun shone simmering on the hot desert, that she had promised
to steal out into the grounds the minute darkness fell--he would be
waiting. A hundred times in the long afternoon, Nan looked into the
cloudless western sky and with puny eager hands would have pushed the
lagging orb on its course that she might sooner give herself into the
arms where she felt her place so sure, her honor so safe, her
helplessness so protected, herself so loved.

How her cheeks burned after supper when she asked her uncle for leave
to post a letter down-town! How breathless with apprehension she
halted as de Spain stepped from the shadow of the trees and drew her
importunately beneath them for the kiss that had burned on her
troubled lips all day! How, girl-like, knowing his caresses were all
her own--knowing she could at an instant call forth enough to smother
her--she tyrannized his importuning and, like a lovely miser, hoarded
her responsiveness under calm eyes and laconic whispers until, when
she did give back his eagerness, she made his senses reel.

How dreamily she listened to every word he let fall in his outpouring
of devotion; how gravely she put up her hand to restrain his busy
intrusion, and asked if he knew that no man in the world, least of all
her fierce and burly cousin, had ever touched her lips until he
himself forced a kiss on them the night before: "And now!" She hid her
face against his shoulder. "Oh, Henry, how I love you! I'm so ashamed,
I couldn't tell you if it weren't night: I'll never look you in the
face again in the daytime."

And when he told her how little he himself had had to do with, and how
little he knew about girls, even from boyhood, how she feigned not to
believe, and believed him still! They were two children raised in the
magic of an hour to the supreme height of life and dizzy together on
its summit.

"I don't see how you can care for _me_, Henry. Oh, I mean it," she
protested, holding her head resolutely up. "You know who we are, away
off there in the mountains. Every one hates us; I suppose they've
plenty of reason to: we hate everybody else. And why shouldn't we?
We're at war with every one. You know, better than I do, what goes on
in the Gap. I don't want to know; I try not to know; Uncle Duke tries
to keep things from me