The light was clear enough so that the reclining young man could make out the pale gold of the unbound tresses of that charming Mrs. Mildred Cochrane and the darker gold of the splendid silken avalanche of the hair of the girl of whom he had been thinking so earnestly as a cooling refuge for his guilty thoughts.
Good God-Cochrane, too, was there! And the great cuss had dispensed with even the scant bathing apparel, which he commonly wore! He was naked-the brute-the fortunate scoundrel! And he was calmly peeling the wisp of a suit from the snowy body of his svelte young wife.
Marion was squatting beside her sister. And-heavens! She was actually laughing, almost hysterically, nervously, to be sure, but yet laughing, at this indecency.
“Don’t be an ass, Maro,” the man was saying. “This is the only real way to bathe-in birthday suits. That’s why we have come out here in the middle of the night, to have this pleasure. So-off it comes, baby.”
“Oh Stan-it does seem so terrible somehow-to bathe all naked in a group!” sighed Marion. “Aren’t you afraid some one will see us, Mildred-?”
“If we’re seen the onlooker will be pleased, you may be sure,” observed her sister, already naked and twisting her lustrous hair to thrust it beneath a bathing cap. “Why be unhappy over pleasing someone-especially an imaginary somebody? Let me tell you that some of our friends here don’t wait until night has fallen to bathe naked. And since both Stanley and I have seen quite everything you’ve got, and hugely admired it all too, why hesitate over this bit of fun?”
“I know-it does seem silly,” sighed Marion.
Slowly she arose to her feet. Her exquisite outlines were revealed in the scrap of silk which she wore.
“But, now, you two won’t rumple me about and try to make me feel funny when I’m all bare, the way you did in the house?” she queried, fumbling at the shoulder of her suit.
“You feel ‘funny’ at the drop of a hat, sweetness,” said the smiling Mildred, approaching to divest her sister of the clinging, diaphanous fabric. “The mere sight of this disgraceful Stan in his present sate of odious excitement-or just he least touch you here and there-and you get all hot and bothered. There, old dear, don’t you feel one thousand times more comfortable? And how dare you be so beautiful, making your own sister jealous?”
The naked sisters were hugging fondly now. And, some ten feet away, lying in the sand, a young man was half-frantic with mixed feelings in which the infinite lust which he had thought to banish was predominant.
God-two young glories, if ever there were any! And this maiden in whom he had fancied a soul mate was quite the most adorable sight now that he had ever seen! Fancy-stark naked with her brother-in-law and sister! How they must have been working upon her girlish modesty as well as her passion during her short stay with them to bring her to this stage of yielding! And all this talk of even greater liberties which seemed to have broken loose in the intimacy of their home life.
Herbert’s head was in a whirl. If there was just the least trace of regret that this maiden whom he had set down as the lone white lamb amid all these attractive black sheep should have accepted-for family consumption, at least-standards so licentious and so obviously wholly novel to her, this regret and this disillusionment were drowned in a vast and voluptuous delight as he saw Marion thus nude and thus suggestively writhing in her sister’s wanton embrace.
For Mildred, a golden little bacchante in the moonlight, was moved to lascivious adventure. Undeterred by the presence of her husband, she was softly drawing between her rosy lips one of her sister’s coral nipples.
“Have a little suck, Stanley,” she called, raising her flushed face momentarily. “They’re too sweet for words. She’s as torrid as a furnace already, the dear!”
The brown-haired and robust Stanley was at the side of the entwined girls. Ashamedly Marion was making a feeble effort to break away from Mildred-Herbert noticed that. But he saw, too, how she trembled and cast her flushed and lovely face upward in the moonlight and he observed how she succumbed, sighing and moaning, when each of her superb breasts knew the caresses of a pair of wanton lips.