The boy’s arm was about her warm, yielding, corsetless waist. Instinctively it tightened.
“Carrie—dear! I—love you!!”
He had never said it in plain words before. His heart leaped with the admission. The hour, the vastness of their freedom, acted upon his self-conscious ego as an opiate. He was the eternal lover.
The girl hung her head. She pressed her arm against the hand which held her tightly. Laughing nervously, she returned:
“I love you too, Natie, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No girl would trust herself out with a fellow so, unless she loved him—very much. Isn’t that right?”
“You know you can trust me, dear.”
“I don’t know as I’m thinking very much about it, Natie. There’s a point where a girl doesn’t care, you know, when she loves a fellow very much.”
They covered a quarter mile in silence.
Far out beyond the Cogswell place was an abandoned pile of weather-grayed lumber. It was half hidden under brambles and wild grape. Nat and the girl reached this pile. Behind it the Cogswell wood lot reared like an enchanted forest, Stygian dark, peri haunted. Across the road, a pasture of sumach and blueberry fell away to the lower shores of a choked and stagnant pond. The hour was too late for the frog chorus to pipe down in this bogland. But occasionally up across the pasture came a single plaintive note or the dull, lugubrious “gut-a-chunk” of a philosophic bullfrog. Once very far away they heard a whippoorwill.
They sat down on this pile of lumber, its weather-spiced fiber even more fragrant than the shrubs and sod around them. Darkness hid scarlet faces. Nathan took the girl on his lap. Their lips met.