"Don't leave me, my dearest, my sweet," he breathed, kissing her lids and hair. "I love you! I love you!"
She gasped once, twice, and her head fell upon his breast, and for a moment she lay wrapped in her youthful modesty as in a mantle.
"Kiss me, Jinnie," Theodore murmured entreatingly.
She buried her head closer against him.
"Kiss me," he insisted, drawing her face upward. His lips fell upon hers, and Jinnie's eyes closed under the magic of her first kiss.
The master-passion of the man brought to sudden life corresponding emotions in the girl--emotions that hurt and frightened her. She put her hand to his face, and touched it. He drew back, looking into her eyes.
"Don't," she breathed. "Don't kiss me any more like--like that."
"But you love me, my girlie, sweet?" he murmured, his lips roving over her face in dear freedom. "You do!... You do!"
Jinnie's arms went about him, but her tongue refused to speak.
"Kiss me again!" Theodore insisted.
Oh, how she wanted to kiss him once more! How she gloried in the strong arms, and the handsome face strung tense with his love for her! Then their lips met in the wonders of a second kiss. Jinnie had thought the first one could never be equaled, but as she lay limply in his arms, his lips upon hers, she lost count of everything.
It might have been the weird effect of the shadows, or the deep, sudden silence about them that drew the girl slowly from his arms.
"I want my fiddle," she whispered. "Let me go!"
Faint were the inflections of the words; insistent the drawing back of the dear warm body.
Theodore permitted her to get up, and with staggering step she took her position at the tree trunk.
Then he sank down, hot blood coursing through his veins. Long ago he had realized in Jinnie and the fiddle essentials--essentials to his future and his happiness, and to-day her kisses and divine, womanly yielding had only strengthened that realization. Nothing now was of any importance to him save this vibrant, temperamental girl. There was something so delightfully young--so pricelessly dear in the way she had surrendered herself to him. The outside world faded from his memory as Jinnie closed her eyes, and with a very white face began to play. For that day she had finished with the song of the fairies, the babbling of the brook, and the nodding rhythm of the flowers in the summer's breeze. All that she considered now was Theodore and his kisses. The bow came down over a string with one long, vibrating, passionate call. It expressed the awakening of the girl's soul--awakened by the touch of a man's turbulent lips--Jinnie's God-given man. Her fiddle knew it--felt it--expressed it!