t.

"And y'are commanded to love your neighbours, Kenn."

I vow she was the takingest madcap in all England, and not the worst heart
neither. I am no Puritan, and youth has its day in which it will be
served. My scruples took wing.

"Faith, one might travel far and not do better," I told her. "When the
gods send their best to a man he were a sorry knave to complain."

Yet I stood helpless, in longing desire and yet afraid to dare. No nicety
of conscience held me now, rather apprehension. I had not lived my one and
twenty years without learning that a young woman may be free of speech and
yet discreet of action, that alluring eyes are oft mismated with prim
maiden conscience. 'Tis in the blood of some of them to throw down the
gauntlet to a man's courage and then to trample on him for daring to
accept the challenge.

Her eyes derided me. A scoffing smile crept into that mocking face of
hers. No longer I shilly-shallied. She had brought me to dance, and she
must pay the piper.

"Modesty is a sweet virtue, but it doesn't butter any bread," I cried
gaily. "Egad, I embrace my temptation."

Which same I did, and the temptress too.

"Am I your temptation, Adam?" quoth the lady presently.

"I vow y'are the fairest enticement, Eve, that ever trod the earth since
the days of the first Garden. For this heaven of your lips I'll pay any
price in reason. A year in purgatory were cheap----"

I stopped, my florid eloquence nipped in bud, for the lady had suddenly
begun to disengage herself. Her glance shot straight over my shoulder to
the entrance of the summer-house. Divining the presence of an intruder, I
turned.

Aileen was standing in the doorway looking at us with an acrid, scornful
smile that went to my heart like a knife.

CHAPTER VII

MY LADY RAGES

I was shaken quite out of my exultation. I stood raging at myself in a
defiant scorn, struck dumb at the folly that will let a man who loves one
woman go sweethearting with another. Her eyes stabbed me, the while I
stood there dogged yet grovelling, no word coming to my dry lips. What was
there to be said? The tie that bound me to Aileen was indefinable,
tenuous, not to be phrased; yet none the less it existed. I stood
convicted, for I had tacitly given her to understand that no woman found
place in my mind save her, and at the first chance she found another in my
arms. Like a detected schoolboy in presence of the rod I awaited my
sentence, my heart a trip-