“Lower,” she said, her voice arching with desire.

And so, he moved his fingers lower and found her well overflowing with passionate cream. He withdrew his hand, held his fingers to his tongue, and tasted her divine dessert. Then he returned to her rich fountain of cream and began to swirl his fingers.

“Yes,” she hissed, and began thrusting her hips forward, inviting him to dip inside her sheath.

He slipped a finger inside, then two, and when she moved more urgently, he hastened the pace, and began sliding almost recklessly through her velvety slit.

“Make love to me, Newland. I want you inside of me.”

He eased down her undergarment and then removed his trousers, so that he could comfortably position himself in a seated position above her. He pulled her hips forward to his lap, and left her upper body lying on the quilt. He grasped her hips and glided his staff between her intimate folds, stopping at the entrance to her sheath. She moved her hips encouragingly, and so without delay, he entered her, sliding his member slowly to the end of her feminine purse. He found her pearl again and began to massage, and when she ground her hips more desirously, he began stroking in and out of her with a more impassioned heat.

She moaned languidly, grasped her own breasts, and began massaging the tips. Her body writhed in rhythm with his strokes, and Newland soon found himself lost in the same abyss of heavenly pleasure. They made sweet divine love until their bodies converged to one focal point. Her body tensed, his chest tightened, and in the following strokes, they climaxed in perfect harmony.

When they came to a rest, she said, “Let’s stay here forever.” For the longest time, they stared deeply into one another’s eyes.

“Yes, let’s,” he finally said. He reached for her arms and pulled her up and into a tight embrace. As he held her, he stroked her head lovingly, tunneling his fingers through her fallen locks. She was pure and innocent, yet loving and passionate. And at that moment, Newland had never admired his young wife and her sense of adventure more.

But all dreams must end, and they soon found themselves in the carriage heading along the main road toward Granny’s place again—short one bottle of champagne.

The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorias, dog-carts, landaus and “vis-a-vis,” carrying well-dressed ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.

“Shall we go to see Granny?” May suddenly proposed. “I should like to tell her myself that I’ve won the prize. There’s lots of time before dinner.”

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue, crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond. In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage- orne on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the chair-arms.