Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/127

 muscles flow beneath the white skin as he lifted it higher and higher until with a gesture of triumph in his own strength he hurled it from him into the midst of the cornfield. Then he ran and leaped and turned cartwheels on the thick red-black soil, and Annie, burying her face in the thick grass to shield it from what she kept seeing, felt a sudden wave of sickening beauty, of a kind she had never known before. It was a new world, as unknown to her as it was to the people of Cordova. Beauty and delight in life flowed in upon her, dazzling and blinding her, and with a great sense of freshness and freedom, as if she were herself for the first time, she pressed her face against the earth and wept.

When she raised her head again he was gone, and pulling herself to her feet she pushed her way through the bushes and ran along the edge of the high corn, keeping close against the willows and sumach for fear that he might see her and know that she had seen him in his nakedness. When she had run a long way, she fell from exhaustion and lay panting.

"From this day," she thought, "I am a lost woman." For she knew now that she was sick with desire for Leander.

In the south the bog was afire and the white smoke drifted slowly up in a great cloud against the prairie sky. In it the lakes of brimstone swam and flickered in the heat.