A man who has been accustomed for months on end to sleep through those wonderful African nights in the wilds may find it hard to cast off the habit of awakening, even from profound slumber, at the slightest sound, which might, in those velvet nights, have been the sniff or rustle or light footfall betokening danger abroad in the veldt. The return to civilization extinguishes such alertness only through the lapse of time. In Herbert Allison, now back with those of his blood and his kind for about a week, the alarm clock of sensitive and trained nerves had not yet run wholly down, even in the course of steamship and train travel.
In bed at eleven this particular night, he had sunk into restful sleep with his customary readiness, and had been roused, too, with his customary readiness, an hour or two later. Faculties on the qui vive at once, he was quickly aware that his faithful senses had played him false by arousing him quite unnecessarily. Here he was far from any danger, in a luxurious bed in the summer home of his young and pretty married sister, his own bungalow being not quite ready for his occupancy.
Yet there was something in the air even amid this peaceful silence, something to which his highly keyed nerves responded sensitively, something which stirred and moved and vaguely distressed him.
Ah, a prolonged, vibrating, soft moan arose plaintively. Such a sound had aroused him, doubtless. Sighs and rustlings followed. He suddenly understood.
Why, damn it all, his sister was in there, just beyond that door. His sister, Edith, and, by God, she was playing the part of a woman to man! This kid of-well, she must be twenty-one. But it was heart-rending, at that, to think of her lying in there, perhaps as bare as a young gazelle, and having that done to her, even by good old Harry Hamilton, his friend at college, who, after all, had a hell of a nerve to come and make his dark-eyed sister of the head of the Allisons a naked animal mewling and mewing with lust in the dark!
So that was it, that was what had aroused him-and was now arousing his sex into sharp erection! Well, he had no particular shame over that. It wasn’t the first time that Edith, bless her heart, had been the cause of his flesh tugging at its leashes.
She had been a sensual and very pretty child. Restricted in her intercourse with boys while in her teens, she had had, he believed, a sort of “crush” upon her only brother, an innocently perverse inclination, her young and ardent flesh speaking. And only the admired, reserved older brother was fond of her, but rating her as just an infant at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
There had been that affair of the stepladder in Edith’s own chamber, the picture which must be hung just as she wished it and which she couldn’t entrust to either maid or manservant for the purpose.
It had not been impossible for him to appraise the facts later on, even though his head was too much awhirl at the time for clear reasoning. Edith had been moved by a sort of pride in her new maturity of flesh, a piqued desire to let him know that she was no longer just the kid he persisted-playfully if tenderly-in treating her. And she had been moved, in by an instinct far older than even the venerated Allison blood.
She had heard him whistling in his own suite-that was it-and had known that he would presently appear in tennis flannels to rumple her hair and paddle her and laugh at her squealing efforts to resent the indignity and to kiss her before going out to the court.
But the picture held high in her hands as she perched on the step ladder had somehow slipped just as he appeared. Edith had squealed in apparent earnestness this time, and he had darted to grasp the frame on the verge of falling. And it was then, as he was putting the picture securely in her extended hands, when she resented his suggestion that he had better hang it himself if she didn’t want it broken. He held the ladder firmly and gazed upward with a touch of real anxiety, because certain revelations burst upon him.
There was the revelation, first, that not even Nannie Leiter or Doris Palmer or even Perdita Armour had quite such slender ankles and beautifully rounded calves which shimmered whitely now through the meshes of very fragile, tightly drawn stockings of dark silk as had this kid sister of fifteen. There was the revelation, as his fraternal yet pleased eyes wandered upward to the short skirt swinging about the round knees, that not even governess nor mother had been able to prevent Edith from adopting already the new frivolity regarding underwear, calling for little or nothing beneath outer garments, which he knew to have become widespread.
Why-good heavens-the kid was about the same as bare! He’d lecture her-no, he wouldn’t-she was fifteen after all, and how very lovely were those white naked thighs which sloped beautifully upward into semi-obscurity from the tops of the stockings, rolled just above the knees!
His fingers tightened upon the stepladder. His comments upon her toil fell away into silence. He cast a glance at the upraised face. He saw the round cheeks flushed unduly, perhaps because of her exertions.
“You’re certain you have the ladder firmly held, Herbie?” came the flustered query in a rather breathless voice. “Because I find I’ve got to stand on the very top to hang this where I want it.”
His answer was a muttered monosyllable. It was half a gasp, indeed. And he swallowed nervously again and again. For the two splendid, plump thighs were no longer pressed together. A small and very neat foot had been raised to the upper level of the ladder while its mate remained below. And the eighteen-year-old boy was shivering with a sort of shamed and furtive but very ardent delight.
Oh, God, what a beautiful thing was the bare bottom of a young girl! Laces hung about Edith, the laces of an unbuttoned something which he had heard referred to otherwise as a “combination.” But the laces served now only as a delicate frame for a clearly seen pair of mounds of snow and delicate rose, with the most enticing and mysterious and fascinating of intervals between them!