you. I love you.” The words rushed from his heart, incoherent, unashamed, foaming through the broken levees of pride and silence. They clung together in the dark, with their wet faces pressed mouth to mouth. Her perfume went drunkenly to his brain; her touch upon him shot through his limbs a glow of magic; he felt the pressure of her narrow breasts, eager and lithe, against him with a sense of fear— as if he had dishonored her—with a sickening remembrance of his defilement.
He held between his hands her elegant small head, so gloriously wound with its thick bracelet of fine blonde hair, and spoke the words he had never spoken—the words of confession, filled with love and humility.
“Don’t go! Don’t go! Please don’t go!” he begged. “Don’t leave, dear. Please!”
“Hush!” she whispered. “I won’t go! I love you, my dear.”
She saw his hand, wrapped in its bloody bandage; she nursed it gently with soft little cries of tenderness. She fetched a bottle of iodine from her room and painted the stinging cut with a brush. She wrapped it with clean strips of fine white cloth, torn from an old waist, scented with a faint and subtle perfume.
Then they sat upon the wooden swing. The house seemed to sleep in darkness. Helen and Eliza came presently from its very quiet depth.
“How’s your hand,’Gene?” Helen asked.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“Let me see! O-ho, you’ve got a nurse now, haven’t you?” she said, with a good laugh.
“What’s that? What’s that? Hurt his hand? How’d you do that? Why, here—say—I’ve got the very thing for it, son,” said Eliza, trying to bustle off in all directions.
“Oh, it’s all right now, mama. It’s been fixed,” he said wearily, reflecting that she had the very thing always too late. He looked at Helen grinning:
“God bless our Happy Home!” he said.
“Poor old Laura!” she laughed, and hugged the girl roughly with one hand. “It’s too bad you have to be dragged into it.”
“That’s all right,” said Laura. “I feel like one of the family now anyhow.”
