"You're good to me, Chad," she told him with a sleepy little smile.
"I aim to be." He stooped and kissed her with a sudden passionate impulse.
Startled at his roughness, she drew back. "Don't ... please!"
He rose abruptly. "Go to sleep," was his harsh command.
A vague uneasiness that was almost fear stirred in her mind. She did not know this man at all. Except for the merest surface commonplaces he was a stranger to her. Yet she had promised to give her life into his keeping. They were alone together in this moonlit night of stars, a thousand miles from all the safeguards that had always hedged her soft youth. After she had married him they would always be together. Even her mother and Phil would be outsiders. So would all her friends—Daisy Ellington and Frank Farrar ... and Steve Yeager if he lived. And he must live. She affirmed that passionately, clung to the thought of it as a drowning man does to a plank. He would get well—of course he would....
And so she fell asleep.