She went back through the gate and Kit resumed his walk, struggling with an annoyance he felt was illogical.  He knew something about Bell’s household and imagined that Janet’s life was not smooth.  He was sorry for her, and it was, of course, unjust to blame her for her father’s deeds.  All the same, the favor she had sometimes shown him was embarrassing.  He was not a philanderer, but he was young and she had made him feel that he had played an ungallant part.  Jane was a flirt, but, after all, it would not have cost him much, so to speak, to play up to her.  Perhaps he had acted like a prig.  This made him angry, although he knew he had taken the proper line.

By and by he came to the water-splash, where a beck crossed the road.  Its channel was paved, so that one could drive across, and at the side a stone causeway had been made for foot passengers.  Sometimes, when the beck was unusually swollen, shallow water covered the stones, and Kit saw the significance of a statement of Janet’s as he noted the width of the submerged spot.  It looked as if Jim Nixon had carried her across.  Then his annoyance vanished and he laughed.  Gallant or not, he was satisfied to carry Janet’s letter.

As he went on in the moonlight he began to see that there were some grounds for his reluctance to indulge the girl.  He had thought about Miss Osborn often since he helped her across the stepping stones.  He had not hesitated then, and although the things were different, to dwell upon the incident was perhaps rasher than indulging Janet.  Miss Osborn had, no doubt, forgotten, but he had not.  The trouble was, he could not forget; his imagination pictured her vividly, sitting beneath the alders talking to him.

With something of an effort Kit pulled himself up.  He was a small farmer’s son and the Osborns were important people.  He knew Osborn’s family pride, which he thought his daughter had inherited.  In Osborn, it was marked by arrogance; in the girl by a gracious, half-stately calm.  For all that, the pride was there, and Kit, resolving that he would not be a fool, went to the post office and put Janet’s letter in the box.

CHAPTER IV

THE PEAT CUTTERS

Osborn was dissatisfied and moody when, one afternoon, he stood, waiting for the grouse, behind a bank of turf on Malton moor.  To begin with, he had played cards until the early morning with some of his guests and had been unlucky.  Then he got up with a headache for which he held his wife accountable; Alice was getting horribly parsimonious, and had bothered him until he tried to cut down his wine merchant’s bill by experimenting with cheaper liquor.  His headache was the consequence.  The whisky he had formerly kept never troubled him like that.

Moreover, it was perhaps a mistake to invite Jardine, although he sometimes gave one a useful hint about speculations on the Stock Exchange.  The fellow went to bigger shoots and looked bored when Osborn’s partridges were scarce and wild; besides, he had broken rules in order to get a shot when they walked the turnip fields in line.  Osborn imagined Jardine would not have done so had he been a guest at one of the houses he boasted about visiting.