"Was Tom Dixon mean to you, teacher?"
Little five-year-old Jimmie Tryon was standing before her, feet apart, fists knotted, and brow furrowed. She swooped upon her champion and snatched him up for a kiss.
"Nobody has been mean to teacher, Jimmie, you dear little kiddikins," she cried. "It's all right, honey. Tom thinks it isn't, but before long he'll know it is."
"Who'll tell him?" Jimmie wanted to know anxiously.
"Some nice girl, little curiosity box. I don't know who yet, but it will be one of two or three I could name," she laughed.
She harnessed the horse and hitched it to the trap in which Jimmie and she came to school. But before she had gathered up the reins to start, another young man strolled upon the scene.
This one was walking and carried a rifle.
At sight of him a glow began to burn through her dark cheeks. They had not been alone together before since that moment when the stress of their emotion had swept them to a meeting of warm lips and warm bodies that had startled her by the electric pulsing of her blood.
Her eyes could not hold to his. Shame dragged the lashes down.
With him it was not shame. The male in him rode triumphant because he had moved a girl to the deeps of her nature. But something in him, some saving sense of embarrassment, of reverence for the purity and innocence he sensed in her, made him shrink from pressing the victory. His mind cast about for a commonplace with which to meet her.