id="id00221">Here audacity half angered, half paralyzed him.

"What a vixen you are!" he observed presently with grudging respect.

The crimson flooded her face, and he watched her teeth gleam dangerously, as if she were bracing herself for a retort. The impulse to torment her was strong in him, and he yielded to it much as a boy might have teased a small captive animal of the woods.

"With such a temper you ought to have been an ugly woman," he said, "but you're so pretty I'm strongly inclined to kiss you."

"If you do, I'll strike you," she gasped.

The virgin in her showed fierce and passionate, not shy and fleeting. That she was by instinct savagely pure, he could tell by the look of her.

"I believe it so perfectly that I've no intention of trying," he rejoined.

"I'm not half so pretty as my mother was," she said after a pause.

Her loyalty to the unfortunate Janet touched him to sympathy. "Don't quarrel with me, Molly," he pleaded, "for I mean to be friends with you."

As he uttered the words, he was conscious of a pleasant feeling of self-approbation while his nature vibrated to the lofty impulse. This sensation was so gratifying while it lasted that his manner assumed a certain austerity as one who had determined to be virtuous at any cost. Morally he was on stilts for the moment, and the sense of elevation was as novel as it was insecure.

"I know you are a good girl, Molly," he observed staidly, "that is why I am so anxious to be your friend."

"Is there nothing more that I can do for you?" she inquired, with frigid reserve, as she took up the lantern.

"Yes, one thing—you can shake hands."

The expression of indignant surprise appeared again in her face, and she fell back a step, shaking her head stubbornly as she did so.

"I'd rather not—if you don't mind," she answered.

"But if I do mind—and I do."

"Still I'd rather not."

"Do you really dislike me as much as you dislike the miller?"

"More."

"Or the rector?"

"Oh, far more. You are a Gay."

"Yes, I am a Gay," he might have retorted, "and you, my pretty savage, are very much a Gay, also."

Swinging the lantern in her hand, she moved to the door, as if she were anxious to put an end to a conversation which had become suddenly too intimate. On the threshold she looked back, and remarked in a precise, authoritative voice:

"There are blankets in the bottom drawer if you find you haven't covering enough."

"I shall remember—there are blankets in the bottom drawer."

"Patsey will bring hot water at eight and Uncle Abednego will give you breakfast in the dining-room."

"Then I'm not to have it with you?"

"With me? Oh, I live with grandfather. I never come to the big house except when Mrs. Gay is in town."

"Do you see nothing, then, of my mother when she is at home?"

"Sometimes I help her to make raspberry vinegar or preserves. If you hear a noise in the night it is only the acorns dropping on the roof. There are so many oaks. Good night, Mr. Jonathan."

"Good night," he returned, "I wish you'd shake hands,"—but she had vanished.

The room was cosy and warm now—and flinging himself into a chair with deep arms that stood on the hearth, he lit his cigar and sipped drowsily the glass of brandy she had left on a silver tray on the table. The ceiling was ridiculously high—what a waste of good bricks and mortar!—the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped with prim folds of damask, and the coverlet was of some quaint crocheted work that hung in fringed ends to the floor. Here again from the threadbare velvet carpet the blue poppies stared back at him.

An acorn dropped on the roof, and in spite of Molly's warning, he started and glanced toward the window, where a frosted pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers—of the fingers of pretty Janet Merryweather—some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted before her birth? Turning to the books on the table, he opened one and a yellowed fragment of paper fluttered to the floor at his feet. When he stooped after it, he saw that there was a single word on it traced faintly in his uncle's hand: "To-morrow."

And then, being a person whose imagination dealt with the obvious, he undressed, blew out the light, and fell peacefully asleep to the dropping of acorns.