Bates turned annoyed.  He had supposed everybody was within.

“What have you lost?” repeated the youth.

“Oh—­” said Bates, prolonging the sound indefinitely.  He was not deceitful or quick at invention, and it seemed to him a manifest absurdity to reply—­“a girl.”  He approached the house, words hesitating on his lips.

“My late partner’s daughter,” he observed, keeping wide of the mark, “usually does the cooking.”

“Married?” asked the young man rapidly.

“She?—­No,” said Bates, taken by surprise.

"Young lady?” asked the other, with more interest.  Bates was not accustomed to consider his ward under his head.

“She is just a young girl about seventeen,” he replied stiffly.

“Oh, halibaloo!” cried the youth joyously.  “Why, stranger, I haven’t set eyes on a young lady these two months.  I’d give a five dollar-bill this minute, if I had it, to set eyes on her right here and now.”  He took his pipe from his lips and clapped his hand upon his side with animation as he spoke.

Bates regarded him with dull disfavour.  He would himself have given more than the sum mentioned to have compassed the same end, but for different reasons, and his own reasons were so grave that the youth’s frivolity seemed to him doubly frivolous.

“I hope,” he said coldly, “that she will come in soon.”  His eyes wandered involuntarily up the hill as he spoke.

“Gone out walking, has she?” The youth’s eyes followed in the same direction.  “Which way has she gone?”

“I don’t know exactly which path she may have taken.”  Bates’s words grew more formal the harder he felt himself pressed.

“Path!” burst out the young man—­"Macadamised road, don’t you mean?  There’s about as much of one as the other on this here hill.”

“I meant,” said Bates, “that I didn’t know where she was.”

His trouble escaped somewhat with his voice as he said this with irritation.

The youth looked at him curiously, and with some incipient sympathy.  After a minute’s reflection he asked, touching his forehead: 

“She ain’t weak here, is she—­like the old lady?”

“Nothing of the sort,” exclaimed Bates, indignantly.  The bare idea cost him a pang.  Until this moment he had been angry with the girl; he was still angry, but a slight modification took place.  He felt with her against all possible imputations.

“All right in the headpiece, is she?” reiterated the other more lightly.

“Very intelligent,” replied Bates.  “I have taught her myself.  She is remarkably intelligent.”  The young man’s sensitive spirits, which had suffered slight depression from contact with Bates’s perturbation, now recovered entirely.

“Oh, Glorianna!” he cried in irrepressible anticipation.  “Let this very intelligent young lady come on!  Why”—­in an explanatory way—­“if I saw as much as a female dress hanging on a clothes-line out to dry, I’m in that state of mind I’d adore it properly.”