"I suspect we are going to flirt this week," she said, drily.

"If you choose to call it that." Her hair was clinging about his fingers.

"Suppose we make a compact--to regard nothing seriously that may occur this week."

"Why are you so afraid of compromising yourself?"

"That belongs to the final explanation. But it is a recognised canon of strawberry-week ethics that everybody flirts furiously. Friendship is entirely too serious. Of course I shall flirt with you,--I shall let Dominga Earle see that at once,--as I am tired of all the others. Will you make the compact?"

"Yes."

The sun had dropped below the ocean; only a bar of paling green lay on the horizon. Voices came faintly over the hill, and the shadows were rapidly gathering.

Thorpe's face moved suddenly to hers. He flung her hair aside and kissed her. She did not respond, nor move. But when he kissed her again and again, she did not repulse him.

"I want you to understand this," he said, and his voice had softened, a rare variation, nor was it steady. "I have not let myself go because you proposed that compact. I am quite willing to forget it."

"But I am not. I expect you to remember it."

"Very well, we can settle that later. Meanwhile, for this week, we will be happy. Have you ever let any man kiss you before?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? What a thing to say!"

"Some one may have found me napping, you know."

"You are very fond of being enigmatical. Why can't you give a straight answer to a straight question?"

"Well--what I meant was that you should not ask impertinent questions.

But, if you insist,--as far as I know, only two men have kissed me,--you and my father."

He drew a quick breath. The ugliest fear that had haunted him took flight. He believed her to be truthful.

He stood up suddenly, and drawing her with him, held her closely until he felt her self-control giving way. When he kissed her again, she put up her arms and clung to him, and kissed him for the first time. He knew then, whatever her reason for suggesting such a compact, or her ultimate purpose, that she loved him.

The mighty blast of a horn echoed among the hills and cliffs. Nina sprang from Thorpe's arms.

"That is one of papa's jokes," she said. "It isn't the horn of the hunter, but of the farmer. Come, supper is ready. Oh, dear!" She clapped her hands to her head. "I can't go up with my hair looking like this. I can just see the polaric disgust of the Hathaway orbs; it goes through one like blue needles. And then the malicious snap of Mrs.

Earle's, and the faint amus.e.m.e.nt of Mrs. McLane's. And I've lost my hairpins! And I never--never--can get to my tent unseen. I'm living with 'Lupie and Molly, and they're sure to be late--on purpose; I hate women--Here! Braid it. Don't tell me you can't! You must!"

She presented her back to Thorpe, who was clumsily endeavouring to adapt himself to her mood. The discipline of the last six weeks stood him in good stead.

"Upon my word!" he exclaimed, in dismay, "I never braided a woman's hair in my life."

"Quick! Divide it in three strands--even--then one over the other--Oh, an idiot could braid hair! Tighter. Ow! Oh, you _are_ so clumsy."

"I know it," humbly. "But it clings to my fingers. I believe you have it charged with electricity. It doesn't look very even."

"I don't imagine it does. But it feels as if it would do. Half way down will be enough--"

"Hallo!" came Hastings's voice from the top of the hill. "Are you two lost in a quicksand?"

"Coming!" cried Nina. She sprang lightly up the hill, chattering as merrily as if she and the silent man beside her had spent the last half-hour flinging pebbles into the ocean.

They separated on the crest of the hill, and went to their respective tents. A few moments later Nina appeared at the supper-table with her disordered locks concealed by a network of sweet-brier. The effect was novel and bizarre, the delicate pink and green very becoming.

"Heaven knows when I'll ever get it off," she whispered to Thorpe, as she took the chair at his side. "It has three thousand thorns."

The girls were in their highest spirit at the supper-table. Mr. McLane and Mr. Randolph were in their best vein, and Hastings and Molly Shropshire talked incessantly. Thorpe heard little that was said; he was consumed with the desire to be alone with Nina Randolph again.

But she would have no more of him that night. After supper, a huge bonfire was built on the edge of a jutting cliff, and the entire party sat about it and told yarns. The women stole away one by one. Nina was almost the first to leave.

The men remained until a late hour, and received calls from hilarious neighbours whose bonfires were also blazing. Don Tiburcio Castro dashed up at one o'clock, and invited Mr. Randolph to bring his party to a grand _merienda_ on the last day but one of their week, and to a ball at the Mission Dolores on the evening following.

VIII

When the party broke up for the night Thorpe walked a half mile over the dunes, until, for any evidence of civilisation, he was alone in the wilderness, then lay down on the warm sand and took counsel with himself.

He had taken the plunge, and he had no regrets. He recalled his doubts, his certainty that the Randolph skeleton was not the figment of a girl's morbid imagination, his a.n.a.lysis of a temperament which he was only beginning to understand, and wherein lay gloomy foreshadowings, the fact that her first appeal had been to his animalism and that the appeal had been direct and powerful. Until the morning of the elk-hunt, he had not admitted that he loved her; but in a flash he had realised her tragic and desolate position, little as he guessed the cause, and coincidently his greater love for her had taken form so definitely that he had not hesitated a moment to ask her to marry him. Later, he had persuaded himself that he was well out of it; but between that time and this he had allowed himself hardly a moment for meditation.

To-night he had not a regret. The certainty that she loved him put his last scruple to flight, and changed his att.i.tude to her irrevocably. He had never loved before, nor had she. She seemed indivisibly and eternally a part of him, and he recalled the sense of ownership he had experienced the night he had met her, when the evil alone in her claimed him. To-night the sense was stronger still, and he no longer believed that there was a spark of evil in her; the moment he became a lover, he became an idealist. He exaggerated every better quality into a perfection; and all other women seemed marionnettes beside the one who could make him shiver with hopes and fears, affect his appet.i.te, and control his dreams, who made him wild to surrender his liberty before he was thirty, and accept a woman of the people as a mother-in-law.

The full knowledge suddenly poured into his brain that he was in love, he,--Dudley Thorpe, who had crammed his life so full of other interests that he had rarely thought of love, believing serenely that it would arrive when he was forty, and ready for it. He lay along the sands and surrendered himself to the experience, the most marvellous and delicious he had ever known. Once he caught himself up and laughed, then felt that he had committed a sacrilege. He knew that as he felt then, as he might continue to feel during his engagement, was an isolated experience in a man's life. He felt like clutching at even the tremours and fears that a.s.sailed him, and cutting them deep in his brain, that he might have their memory sharp and vivid when he was long married and serenely content. He was happier in those moments, lying alone on the dry warm sand under the crowding stars which had outlived so many pa.s.sions, than when he had held her in his arms. He felt that something had escaped him when they had been together, some thought had strayed; and he determined to concentrate his faculties more fully and to become a master in love.

He did nothing by halves, and he would be completely happy.

Then his thoughts became practical once more. Her admission that she loved him had given him a right to control her life, to protect her, to think for both. He was a very high-handed man, and, having made up his mind to marry Nina Randolph, he regarded her opposition as non-existent.

He would argue it out with her, when she was ready to speak, knowing that the mental tide of woman, when undammed, must have its way; but he alone would decide the issue.

He should no longer torment himself with imaginings, rehearsing every ill that could befall a woman, whether the act of her own folly or the cruel hatching of Circ.u.mstance. It mattered nothing; he should marry her. His want of her was maddening. The desire to pluck her from her present life, to make her happy, possessed him.

IX

The next morning all were up at eight and picking strawberries for breakfast. The prolonged and vociferous music of the horn had precluded all hope of laziness, and the late seekers after sleep were obliged to turn out with the best grace possible. A plunge in the sea had animated the men for the day, and the women were very fresh and amiable.

After breakfast they scattered about the hills and beach. It was a cloudless dark-blue day. The air was warm and dry. The bleak sand dunes were reclaimed for a brief season by the vivid green of willow and oak, the fields of purple lupin and yellow poppy; the trade winds were elsewhere, and the vegetation of San Francisco enjoyed its brief span of life. A ship with all her sails spread drifted, sleepily, over the bar.

Thorpe and Nina climbed an eminence from which they could see the Mission Dolores, far on the right, the smoke curling languidly from its great chimneys; the square Presidio of romantic memories and prosaic present; the distant city, whose loud feverish pulse they fancied they could hear.

They sat down under a tree. Nina took off her hat, and threw back her head. "I think I am the re-embodiment of some pagan ancestor," she said.