Who Goes There!

"You refuse?"

"Yes, please."

He said: "Very well, then," with an alarming frown.

"Kervyn – "

"What?"

"If you tear my gown I – I shall have to go to bed."

"I'm not going to touch your gown," he said. "I'm going to charm those papers so they'll leave their hiding place and fly into my pocket. Watch me very attentively, Karen!" And he tucked up his cuffs and made a few short passes in the air. Then he smiled at her.

"Kervyn! I thought you meant to take them. Do you know you really did frighten me?"

"I have got them," he said.

The colour came back into her cheeks; she smiled at him in a breathless way.

"You did frighten me," she said. She came slowly back and seated herself on the carpet of fir-needles. He sat down beside her.

"Karen, dear," he said, "you are a brick and I'm a brute. I took your papers this morning. I had to, dear."

And he drew them from his breast pocket and showed them to her.

The girl sat in wide-eyed amazement for a moment. Suddenly her face flushed and the tears flashed in her eyes.

"You have ridiculed me!" she said. "You have treated me like a child!"

"Karen – "

"I will not listen! I shall never listen to you again! You have played with me, hurt me, humiliated me. You have ruled and overruled me! You gained my friendship and treated it – and me – without ceremony. And I let you! I must have been mad – "

Her mouth quivered; she clenched her hands, gazing at him through eyes that glimmered wet:

"How could you do it? I was honest with you; I had had no experience with a man I cared for. You knew it. You let me care for you until I didn't understand – until the sincerity and force of what I felt for you bewildered me!

"And now – and now I am – unhappy – unhappy – miserable, ashamed – " She caught her breath, scarcely able to see him through her tears – no longer able to control the quivering lip.

She rose swiftly, encountered something – his arm – felt herself drawn resistlessly into his embrace.

"Forgive me, Karen," he said. "I did not realize – what was happening to – us both."

She rested her forehead on his shoulder for a moment.

"Can you forgive me, Karen?"

"Yes."

"You know I truly care for you?"

"Yes."

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he bent to touch her forehead with his lips, and she lifted her face at the same moment. His kiss fell on her mouth, and she responded. At the same instant her girlhood ended forever – vanished on her lips in a little sigh.

Dazed, silenced, a trifle faint, she turned from him blindly.

"Please," she whispered, in the ghost of a voice; and he released her.

For a few moments she stood resting against the fir-tree, her left arm across her eyes, frightened, motionless.

The forest was very still around her, as though every leaf were listening.

CHAPTER XVII

HER FIRST CAMPAIGN

"Karen," she heard him say, in a constrained and unfamiliar voice, "I love you."

If he thought he was still speaking to the same girl whose soft and fragrant lips he had touched a moment before, he was mistaken. He spoke too late. The girl had vanished with her girlhood.

And now it was with a very different sort of being he had to do – with a woman whose mind had quickened under shock; whose latent emotions had been made conscious; whose spirit, awakened by a crisis, was already armoured and in arms. Aroused, alert, every instinct awake, proud of a new and radiant knowledge, new motives germinated, new impulses possessed her; a new and delicious wisdom thrilled her. She was ready, and she realized it.

"Karen?"

She heard him perfectly. Deep within her something was laughing. There was no hurry. She knew it.

"Karen?" he said, very humbly.

Conscious of the change within herself, still a little surprised and excited by it, and by a vaguely exquisite sensation of impending adventure, of perils charmingly indefinite, of the newness of it all, deep, deep within her she felt the certainty, the tranquillity, the sweet intoxication of power. Power! She knew she was using it now. She knew she was exercising it on this man. And, for a second, the grasp of the new weapon almost frightened her. For it was her first campaign. And she had not yet reconnoitered the adversary or fully developed his strength and position. Man, as an adversary, was still unknown to her.

"Karen?" he ventured, rather anxiously.

Instantly she lost a large portion of her fear of him. Oh! but she had a long, long reckoning to settle yet with him. She cast a swift glance backward, but already her girlhood was gone – gone with its simplicity, its quaint perplexities, its dear ignorance, its pathos, its helplessness before experience, its naïveté, its faith.

It had gone, slipped away, exhaled in a deep, unconscious sigh. And suddenly she flushed hotly, remembering his lips. Truly, truly there was a long reckoning still to come… But there seemed to be no hurry.

Still leaning against the tree, she fumbled for her handkerchief, touched her eyes with it leisurely, then, still turning her back to him, she lifted her hands to her hair.

For a first campaign she was doing very well.

Her thick, burnished hair was not in any desperate disorder, but she touched it here and there, patted, tucked, caressed it with light, swift fingers, delicately precise as the exploring antennæ of a butterfly.

"Give me my answer, Karen," he urged, in a low voice, stepping nearer. Instantly she moved lightly aside to avoid him – just a short step – her back still turned, her hands framing her bright hair. Presently she looked around with a slight laugh, which seemed to say: "Have you noticed my new wings? If I choose to use them, I become unattainable. Take care, my friend!"

The expression of her face checked him; her eyes were still starry from tears. The dewy loveliness of them, the soft shyness born of knowledge, the new charm of her left him silent and surprised. He had supposed that she was rather low in her mind. Also he became aware that something about her familiar to him had gone, that he was confronted by something in her hitherto unsuspected and undetected – something subtly experienced and unexpectedly mature. But that a new intelligence, made radiant by the consciousness of power, had suddenly developed and enveloped this young girl, and was now confronting him he did not comprehend at first.

And yet, in her attitude, in the poise of the small head, in the slight laugh parting her lips, in every line of her supple figure, every contour, every movement, he was aware of a surety, a self-confidence, a sort of serene authority utterly unfamiliar to him in her personality.