Not even the determined smile of the man-beneath which smoldered something alien to mirth-could reassure the struggling Marion in the least as she was drawn across his bare and extended legs, face downward.

“Don’t you dare!” she panted as she felt his fingers thrust the thinly veiled silk upwards and completely off from one hemisphere of her rear mounds. “I-oh, heavens, Stanley, are you mad? I’ll tell Mildred-I’ll tell everybody!”

“After dinner at the cafe would be a good time,” he murmured shakily. Shakily, because the snowy satin of that perfect buttock beneath his eyes and his fingers was moving him mightily. “Must I spank, Maro, dear? Or will you get back as you were until I’ve finished lecturing you?”

Already his fingers were busy with the task of laying the other promontory naked.

“Yes, yes, yes-yes, I will!” wailed the shame-ridden maiden. “Oh, I would never have supposed you such a perfect monster!”

And the position-flat on her back, knees raised and well parted-which she had so innocently and unthinkingly assumed earlier, became, by his hands guiding her to resume it and by her present realization of what it had suggested to him, a posture which shook her with vast embarrassment.

“Now, then. Item: a very, very, suggestive prominence in a very delicate region,” he said brazenly. “If you close your legs again, Maro, over you go on your soft stomach. Wider, wider yet-that’s it. Now let me tell you that, although I’ve seen attractive little bulges at the crotch of many a bathing suit on this beach, I’ve never seen such a plump, pudgy, cute, hair-shrouded hill obtrude its presence on my entranced but reproving eyes here or anywhere. Baby girl, sweet sister, I can almost see the exact hue of the little grove against the whiteness of the skin. Whiteness, did I say? Yet it seems to me that there is something dimly visible which is not altogether white, a something so delicate, so altogether enticing and maddening that-!”