Then she caught Nicholas’s arm and marched off like a dispensing providence with a vassal in tow.  Nicholas followed obediently.  He was sufficiently cowed into non-resistance, and he felt a wholesome awe of his defender, albeit he wished that it had been a boy like himself instead of a slip of a girl with short skirts and a sunbonnet.  At the bottom of his heart there existed an instinctive contempt of the sex which Eugenia represented, developed by the fact that it was not force but weakness that had vanquished his victorious opponent.  Dudley Webb was a gentleman, and only a bully would strike a girl, even if she were a spitfire—­the term by which he characterised Eugenia.  He remembered suddenly her exultant, “an’ you can’t hit me back!” and it seemed to him that, even in the righteous cause of his deliverance, she had taken an unfair and feminine advantage of the handsome boy for whom he cherished a shrinking admiration.

As for Eugenia herself, she was troubled by no such misgivings.  She walked slightly in front of him, her blue skirt swinging briskly from side to side, her white sunbonnet hanging by its strings from her shoulders.  Above the starched ruffles rose her small dark head and white profile, and Nicholas could see the determined curve of her chin and the humorous tremor of her nostril.  It was a vivid little face, devoid of colour except for the warm mouth, and sparkling with animation which burned steadily at the white heat of intensity—­but to Nicholas she was only a plain, dark, little girl, with an unhealthy pallor of complexion.  He was grateful, nevertheless, and when his first regret that she was not a boy was over he experienced a thrill of affection.  It was the first time that any one had deliberately taken his part in the face of opposing odds, and the stand seemed to bring him closer to his companion.  He held her books tightly, and his face softened as he looked at her, until it was transfigured by the warmth of his emotion.  Then, as they passed the college grounds, where a knot of students greeted Eugenia hilariously, and turned upon the Old Stage Road, he reached out timidly to take the small hand hanging by her side.

“It’s better walkin’ on this side the road,” he said with a mild assumption of masculine supremacy.  “I wouldn’t walk in the dust.”

Eugenia looked at him gravely and drew her hand away.

“You mustn’t do that,” she responded severely.  “When I said you weren’t common I didn’t mean that you really weren’t, you know; because, of course, you are.  I jest meant that I wouldn’t let them say so.”

Nicholas stood in the centre of the road and stared at her, his face flushing and a slow rage creeping into his eyes.

For a moment he stood in trembling silence.  Then he threw the books from him into the sand at her feet, and with a choking sob sped past her to vanish amid a whirl of dust in the sunny distance.

Eugenia looked thoughtfully down upon her scattered possessions.  She was all alone upon the highway, and around her the open fields rolled off into the green of far-off forests.  The sunshine fell hotly over her, and straight ahead the white road lay like a living thing.