She laid a proprietary arm in his, as they passed through the rainbow glimmer of Oriental lanterns swaying between the lawn trees. "Is Adamsville always as deadly as this? New Orleans is bad enough--but this!"
His throaty chuckle answered her. "I assure you I don't know."
"Sounds imposing. What do you do, besides dance and use those serious eyes?"
"That's all my regular vocation. At off times I play tennis, wave my hair in the breeze, and inspect mines."
"It's nice hair." She regarded it thoughtfully.
With amused tolerance she smoothed it, then yanked it suddenly.
An egotistic restlessness urged him. He thought once or twice of Jane, as he monopolized this girl. By an emotional vagary he connected the other with the clipped and forbidden rigors of the mountain life, which he had divorced finally.
"How about dinner at the club to-morrow night, and the dance afterwards? Or a ride?"
"But I'm to go out to the James', at Meadow Valley. Are you going?"
"Would they include you? Could I suggest it? It's an informal affair. It'll break up early."
"I think it will be all right. She's here to-night.... We could have dinner first."
He found an infrequent sparkle in her conversation, a pretty froth of talk that pleased. But it was not for this that he sought her out. The urge to wander that the mountain had sown in his blood impelled him most of all. He felt his imagination inflamed by the stimulus of her presence, the vivid challenge of her eyes, the audacious invitation of her lips. He had met no woman hitherto who so invited love-making. She seemed a rounded vessel brimfull of soft airs and caressing modulations of speech, that promised more than the bare words warranted.
On the return from the James' country home, they shot ahead of the other cars, purring in poised flight down the smooth macadam of the county road. He turned off into the upward slope above Hazelton that led to the mountain; he regarded himself as its privileged showman. In front of the drowsy trimness of farm houses they pulsed, until at last he stopped the engine where the road rounded over a steep outcrop dropping a jagged hundred feet to the steep tree-y declivity below.
"There's a bench. It's a wonderful view," he said, his speech thickened--the old timidity at the moment when passion possessed him again struggling against his desire.