The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes Page A

happy—provided she didn’t begin to wonder.... But wondering left her sorely puzzled. He seemed to like her, and yet.... Indeed you’d have thought he liked her a lot , but.... Well, what boy had ever behaved a bit like Augustine provided he liked you at all?
    For Ree’s was a culture-pattern where no boy out of his diapers failed to get all the manual fun they allowed from the bodies of girls he liked once out of their diapers too: yet Augustine’s fingers had never shown even the faintest desire to molest her, however lonely the places she took him. True, she was well aware that as boys grow big themselves they lose their taste for a “child” in the skinny, physical sense; but the thought that Augustine’s culture-pattern was one so deranged as to class her a child even now that her “turtle was soft” (as she’d told him the first time they met) never entered her head. It is quite on the cards that the burning desire she had lately begun to feel for his lips and his fingers was partly at least no more than her need for their bare reassurance he liked her.
    *
    As for Augustine, where Ree was concerned his head was still in the clouds—or the sand, you can take your choice which; and here she was, dancing around on his porch agog with a plan that had come to her in a dream—which surely augured success!
    Last night she had dreamed of a golden, sleeping, fairy palace with rows of beautiful marble pillars to stroke, where she found herself changed to a dazzling fairy princess with a prince on his knees at her feet. As she woke, her plan was already half-formed. This sleeping palace must mean the Big Warren Place (since to her that ruinous derelict breathed of romance): so today they two must battle their way through the bushes and climb in together where no one had entered for years, whereupon her dream would come true.... Therefore she routed Augustine out of his shack, and told him with dancing eyes she was tired of dreary old woods but this would be something new.
    When a rather reluctant Augustine (aware that he couldn’t afford to get caught on a prank of this sort) inquired what on earth she expected to find when she got there, she waxed mysterious: told him, the place being haunted she hoped for a ghost—and ghosts were the Cat’s Pajamas, apparently.... Anguish so suddenly clouded her eyes at his hesitation he finally had to say Yes.
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    As Augustine lifted her over the boundary ditch her breath on his cheek felt cool, which proved what a scorcher the day was. Alas, here on land there was nowhere at all to get out of the heat: even here in the depths of the trees they were both of them soaked in sweat. It was better by far at sea, where even down in the tropics was cooler than this: in the belly perhaps of a close-hauled mainsail, half-standing and half-reclining, cooled by the steady downflow of air with your back in the curve of the canvas and feet on the boom.... Once, though, for a lark the skipper had put her about and he’d only just woken in time not to get catapulted into the ocean!
    At this recollection he burst out laughing; but Ree squeezed his fingers to stop him (and Ree was quite right, for there might be someone in earshot across the road at the store and they simply mustn’t be heard).
    When at last they had fought their way to the house Ree just couldn’t wait to get in: so Augustine tore off a sagging shutter, and heaved her light weight up and over the sill—but he did it with so much strength that she tumbled inside on her nose. Her jeans were too tight and too tender: they split, and a pale efflorescence of all that incongruous crêpe-de-chine escaped through the rent on her rump. Then she stood up; and the fingers she’d used to wipe the sweat from her eyes had streaked her features with dirt, for the floor where she’d fallen was thick.... But before he could even begin to tease her she pressed her grimy