“Don’t take it so to heart, Molly,” he said, awkwardly.

“It’s hard, but—­Shucks, lookit, I’ve got something to tell you.”

In very truth he had something to tell her but he had not meant to tell her so soon.

“Lemme take care of you, Molly—­dear.  You know I love you, and—­”

“Stop!” Molly turned to him an expressionless face.  She looked at him steadily.  “You say you love me?” she went on.

“Shore I say it.”  He was plainly puzzled at her reception of what he had said.  Girls did not act this way in books.

“How about that—­that other girl?  Marie, I think her name is.”

“What about her?”

“A good deal.”

“What has she got to do with my loving you, I’d like to know?”

“She loves you.”

“Marie?  Loves me?  Yo’re crazy!”

“Oh, am I?  If she hadn’t loved you do you think for one minute she’d come riding all the way out here to give you a warning?”

“Marie and I are friends,” he admitted.  “But there ain’t any law against that.”

“None at all.”  Molly’s eyes dropped.  Her head turned back.  She resumed her operations with a spoon in the bowl.

“Lookit here, Molly—­”

“Don’t you call me Molly.”  Her tone was as lacking in expression as was her face.

“But you’ve got to listen to me!” he insisted, desperately.  “I tell you there ain’t anything between Marie and me.”

“Then there ought to be.”  Thus Molly.  Womanlike she yearned to use her claws.

“But—­”

“Oh, I’ve heard all about your carryings on with that—­creature; how you talk to her, and people have seen you walking with her on the street.  I saw you myself.  Yesterday when Mis’ Jackson drove out here to buy three hens she told me when the girl was arrested and fined for trying to murder a man you stepped up and paid her fine.  Did you?”

“I did.  But—­”

“There aren’t any buts!  You’ve got a nerve, you have, making love to me after running round with that wretched hussy!”

“She ain’t a hussy!” denied the exasperated Racey, who was always loyal to absent friends.  “She’s all right.  Just because she happens to be a lookout in the Happy Heart ain’t anything against her.  It don’t give you nor anybody else license to insult her.”

This was too much.  Not content with confessing his friendship for the girl, he was standing up for her.  Molly whirled upon him.

“Go!” Tone and business could not have been excelled by Peg Woffington herself.

Racey went.

“What’s the matter?” queried a sleepy voice from the doorway giving into an inner room, as Racey’s spurred heels jingled past the washbench.  “What’s goin’ on?  Who was here?  What you yelling about, anyway?”

“Racey was here, Ma,” said Molly.

“Seems to me you made an uncommon racket about it,” grumbled her mother, plodding into the kitchen in her slippers.