His fingers caught in the bronze mesh. "It is wound around my ring." He fumbled in his pockets with his free hand and got his knife. "It may pull a bit."
He showed her presently the lock which he had cut. "It seems alive," he kissed it and put it in his pocket.
Her protest was genuine. "Oh, please," she said, "I wish you wouldn't."
"Wouldn't what?"
"Keep it."
"Shall I throw it away?"
"You shouldn't have cut it off."
"Other men have been tempted—in a garden——"
It might have startled George could he have known that old Mandy, eyeing him from the kitchen, placed him in Eden's bower not as the hero of the world's initial tragedy, but as its Satanic villain.
"He sutt'n'y have bewitched Miss Becky," she told Calvin; "she ain' got her min' on nothin' but him."