suddenly, the laughter still on his lips, he kissed her. Kissed her full on the lips like an adept and yet like a light-hearted boy. A woman returns a kiss by taking it. The butterfly something in her soul had suddenly fluttered up; without thought, in the fraction of a second, she had consented—not resisted—and there you are. He went out with his cigarettes, with a laugh that seemed part of the whole light business, and Cerise, taking her seat again on the ledge, rested her hands in her lap. No one had seen. There was only Mother Rimbaut and she was half blind and bound up in her knitting; besides, even if she had possessed the eyes of a hawk, she was not in the proper line of vision; then, too, she was deaf—what did it matter?

The shop was empty, Carstairs was gone, but the kiss....

It was her first kiss and it clung, and a warmth that was warmer than her southern blood stole from it through her veins and to her heart. It was as though he had kissed her heart.

A burly prison warden in white with a huge revolver at his hip came in for tobacco, and she found herself thinking, “Good heavens, that thing is a man!” She was contrasting him with Carstairs. She had talked of men, talked of marriage, talked of love with Marianne or her girl friends just as she had talked of the price of salt fish or Norfolk Island strawberries or the latest fashion from Paris as exhibited by the garrison officers’ wives; but she had talked without knowing, almost without thinking. Her butterfly mind had flitted above these vast subjects as a butterfly flits sentient yet unthinking above a field of corn. It had suddenly come to rest—that which a moment before had been all wings suddenly becoming all eyes; come to rest swaying on the wind that moved the corn-stalk, astonished by the vision that had come so close, seeing everything but the poppies that nature so carefully hides amid the corn.

As she sat, her hands folded and her eyes fixed on the shop door as though she were wondering what else might come through it, the silence of the shop was broken by a faint clicking sound, the clicking of the old woman’s needles as she worked, forever busy like a spider in the dark; and now through the mind of the girl, as she sat with her eyes on the door, came half harlequin, half demon, stealing and hirpling, limping and laughing and turning somersaults, the strangest thought.

He didn’t kiss you, he kissed Marianne. He had mistaken her for Marianne; the warmth about her heart belonged to Marianne; the new outlook which had come to her was 

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