He laughed and we made love until both our bodies shone with sweat, our hearts ready to burst, our lungs unable to keep up with the demand for air. Gasping, but happier than ever, we lay back, our heads beside each other, his arm around my shoulders, and waited to catch enough breath to speak.

"Can you ever doubt my love for you?" he asked. "No more than I can doubt my own for you."

"Good. Then let there be no more talk of resisting."

I curled up in the warm nook of his arm and listened as he described what it was like for him anticipating our rendezvous, planning it around his father's trip.

"We were so busy, I didn't know when we would be able to get back here, but my father was almost as anxious as I was."

"No one will miss you at home when they see you haven't returned with him?" I asked, meaning his wife.

"I'm on a business trip as far as anyone knows. It's not uncommon for me to do that, but I think my father has some suspicions."

"What will he do?" I asked, a bit frightened.

"Nothing. He isn't looking for any more unpleasantness. Despite the way he behaves with his friends, he is a very unhappy man these days. First, there is my brother Jean, as I told you, and second, there's . . ."

"What?" I asked when he hesitated.

"My wife's failure to be with child. He's been hoping for grandchildren. He's very disappointed."

"Is there no hope that your brother will someday recuperate?"

"No. The doctors believe the damage was permanent. He may improve enough to take care of his basic needs, but he'll never be the man he was," Pierre said, and sat up quickly. "I blame myself," he added.

I put my hand on his back. "Why? If you were caught in a storm . ."

"I should have never gone out with him. If I hadn't, if I had listened to my own warnings and not let him taunt me into it, he would be fine today."

"But he was a good sailor, wasn't he? He should have known, too."

"Jean was always challenging me to be like him. I think that ego of his got the best of him. I should have restrained him. I'm older, wiser," he said.

"But you're a man, and every man has ego, I'm sure."

"No," he said sharply. "It was my fault," he said firmly. "I've got to learn to live with that, but more importantly, I've got to find a way to bring my father some happiness before he dies. I try. I do the best I can with our businesses, but it's never enough. My father is a very demanding person, you see.

"But," he said suddenly, turning back to me and smiling, "let's not talk about my family problems. Let's just talk about us.

"Let us make a pledge to one another. Let us pledge to care only about our own bliss and not think about the consequences of anything we do together as long as we do it out of love and for each other."

"It sounds like a very selfish pledge," I said.

"It's meant to be. I want to pluck happiness out of the jaws of sadness, drive the monster away and keep us protected forever and ever, shielded from the miseries, the jealousies, the evil, that seems to seep into everyone's life, even the richest and most respected people. No one will have the ecstasy we will have, Gabrielle. I swear."

"You overwhelm me with your love for me," I said. "It scares me because I don't know if I can keep such a pledge, Pierre. I think my mother already knows about us."

"If she's truly a woman with vision, she will see how full your heart is and how good our love is and she will not want us to part."

"But you're married. We can't be lovers forever."

"We'll find a way, somehow," he said. "For now, let's not think about it. Let's not think about anything that takes from our love. Let's be deliberately blind and deaf to anything but ourselves. Can you do that?"

He didn't wait for my reply. He brought his lips to mine and then he kissed my chin and my breasts, laying his head in my lap. I stroked his hair and gazed down into his handsome face and pleading eyes and ordered the voices inside me that wanted to warn me to be silent.

Be still my heart, I thought, and listen only to my love's vow.

I lay back on the pillow. It started to pour, the drops tapping on the tin roof. He raised himself slowly and then brought himself to me so we could make love again to the rhythm of the rain.

It was still raining when I left the shack to pole my pirogue home. Pierre wanted to drive me, but I told him it was far from the first time I poled in the rain, even at night. He walked down to the dock with me and we kissed as we parted. He stood there, smiling, the drops trickling over his cheeks, soaking him, but him acting as if it were the brightest, driest day. I pushed off and waved and, after a moment, lost sight of him in the darkness. He said he was going to drive back to New Orleans tonight and he would let me know when he would be able to return to our love nest.

Mama and Daddy weren't home when I returned, which made it easier for me. I didn't like lying to Mama, but I had a story already prepared. I was long in bed and even asleep when they came home. I woke to the sounds of Daddy's laughter and Mama telling him to hush up. He knocked into a chair and Mama chastised him again. Then she helped him up the stairs and into bed. I heard her come to my doorway and sensed she was standing there awhile, but I pretended to be asleep.

Daddy slept late the next morning. When I went down to breakfast, Mama was up, sitting at the table, her hands cupped around a mug of steaming coffee. She gazed into the dark liquid as if it were a crystal ball.

"Morning, Mama," I said, and shifted my eyes quickly to avoid her penetrating gaze when she raised her head. It was as good as a confession. She waited for me to get some coffee and a biscuit before she spoke.

"You went out after your daddy and me left last night, didn't you, Gabrielle?"

"Yes, Mama."

"Where did you go?"

"Just for a walk and then a short ride in the pirogue," I said. I put some jam on my biscuit.

"You met that man someplace, didn't you, Gabrielle?" she asked directly. My heart stopped and then fluttered. "You can't lie to me, Gabrielle. It's written in your face."

"Oui, Mama," I confessed. She was right: Keeping the truth from Mama was like trying to hold back a twister.

"Oh, honey," she moaned. "After what you've been through, you've suffered, to go and start with another married man."

"We love each other, Mama. It's different and it's not like anything I've ever felt before," I protested.

"How would you know?" she asked with a stern face. "You've never really had a boyfriend."

"It can't be this good with anyone else."

"Of course it can. You're just feeling your first real excitement, and with a very sophisticated, rich city man who probably has a half dozen young mistresses," she declared.

Such an idea had never occurred to me.

"No, Mama, he said . . ."

"He'd say anything to get you where he wants you, Gabrielle." She leaned toward me so I couldn't look away from those all-knowing eyes. "And he would make any promise to get what he wants. If you believe him, it's because you want to, first, and second, because he's done it so many times before, he's good at it," she concluded.

I stared, thinking. Then I shook my head. "He can't be that way; he can't," I insisted, as much to myself as to her.

"Why not, Gabrielle?"

"I feel him," I said, putting my hand over my heart, "deeply in here, My feelings have never betrayed me before," I insisted, building my own courage. "Since I was a little girl, I have known what is true and what is not. My animals . . ."

"Animals are so much simpler than people, Gabrielle. They are not conniving and deceitful."

"Tell that to my spiders," I shot back. Mama's eyes softened for a moment with a little amusement, but then she grew worried again.

"All right, what of your spider who sets up such a seemingly harmless world around him, so innocent looking, the fly always steps into it and realizes it too late?

"A rich, sophisticated man like Monsieur Dumas has the power to weave a very inviting world around him. He will catch you in it, and when you realize it, it will be too late."

"Pierre is no more conniving than I am, Mama. You don't know him yet."

"And you do? Already?"

"Our feelings for each other have opened our hearts and minds to each other. When you love each other deeply, truly, it takes only minutes to know everything there is to know. He has told me of his great unhappiness and I see how much he suffers, even though he is a wealthy man."

"And what of his wife, then?" she asked.

"They lead separate lives right now. She has been unable to give him a child and she is more involved with her society friends than with him," I explained.

"But where will all this take you, Gabrielle?" she asked with despair.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"And for the moment, you don't care because you're blinded by your feelings and your excitement. Don't you think I know how desperate you are for a real love, how much you need someone who will love you truly, especially after your horrid experience? You're jumping on the first opportunity, only it's not an opportunity, Gabrielle. It's like a false dawn. You're going to plummet into a deeper darkness."

She sat back firmly, her words lying heavy in the air between us.

"I want you to tell this man first chance you get that you won't ever see him again, hear? If you don't, I will, Gabrielle, even if it means marching down that road all the way to New Orleans and knocking on his front door," she threatened.

"Oh Mama, please . . ."

"If I stood by and watched you drown, I'd be wrong, wouldn't I? Well, I ain't gonna stand by and watch this, neither," she vowed.

We heard the floorboards above us groan.

"It's best your daddy don't know nothing about this, Gabrielle, hear?"

"Yes, Mama." I looked down.

"I'm sorry, honey, but I know what's best for you."

I shot an angry glance at her. Why did she always know what was best for me? She wasn't me. What did she think it was like having a traiteur for a mother, thinking all these years that my every thought, my every feeling, was as naked as a newly born doe before her eyes? Besides, I thought, when it came to love, Mama wasn't infallible. Look at the mistake she had made, the marriage she had. Defiant, I rose from the table and left the room.

"Gabrielle!"

The front door slammed shut behind me as I jogged down the galerie steps and around back, heading toward the canal. I remained away from home most of the day, wandering through my paths, weaving along the water, sitting on a big rock and watching the birds and the fish. I spent most of the time arguing with myself.

The sensible side of me took Mama's side, of course, claiming she was only looking out for my happiness and trying to protect me from sadness and disappointment. That side of me warned against living for the moment. It ridiculed the pledge Pierre and I had made to each other. What sort of a pledge was it anyway, a pledge to ignore everything and anything but our own pleasure? Living for the moment was shortsighted. What would happen when that day of reckoning came?

The other side of me, the wild and free side that found its strength in Nature, that side of me which was never comfortable confined by clothes and houses and man-made rules, refused to listen. Look at the birds. They don't sit worrying about the winter; they enjoy the spring and the summer and feel the warm breeze around them when they glide through the air, free . . . happy.

And what of these people who have been sensible and who have married the so-called right person? What of these people who have never been naked under the sun and the stars, who have listened first to their minds and then their hearts? Trapped in their wise and reasonable decisions, they wither away wondering what it might have been like if they had followed their feelings instead of their thoughts.

But your mama followed her feelings instead of her thoughts, my sensible side retorted. That thought shut me up for a while. I sat there, brooding. My sensible side continued. She's only trying to give you the benefit of her wisdom, a wisdom unfortunately gained through pain and suffering. Can't you take her gift gracefully and stop being a stubborn, selfish little girl?

I swallowed back my tears and took a deep breath.

Still defiant, or tying to be, I turned my face to the wind and screamed.

"I love Pierre! I will always love him. I won't give him up. I won't!"