Gordon Makimmon gazed with newly-awakened
interest at Lettice; for the first time he thought of
her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he
discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing
quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily
forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated
regret enveloped him in the shadow of its
melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the
swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time.
A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him...
she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon's, care.
The anger touched his pride, his self-esteem, and
grew cold, deliberate: he watched with a contracted
jaw for Simmons' appearance.

"Why," he exclaimed, in a lowered voice, "that
lown tore your pretty shirtwaist!"

"He had no reason at all," she protested; "it
was just horrid." A little shiver ran over her.
"He... he held me and kissed... hateful."

"I'll teach him to keep his kissing where it's
liked," Gordon proclaimed. His instinctively
theatrical manner diminished not a jot the menace
of the threat.

"Oh!, please, please don't fight." She turned a
deeply concerned countenance upon him. "That
would hurt me very much more--"

"It won't be a fight," he reassured her, "only a
little hint, something for Buck to think about. No

[[27]]

p026 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p027w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p028

v?