Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face.  A double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson’s mind:  she was rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks—­well, she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan Bryerson.

When the dog was reduced to quietude, the small one repaid Thomas Jefferson’s stare with a level gaze out of the over-sized eyes.

“Was it that you were afraid of Hector?” she asked.

“Huh!” said Thomas Jefferson, and the scorn was partly for her queer way of speaking and partly for the foolishness of the question.  “Huh!  I reckon you don’t know who I am.  I’d have killed your dog if he’d jumped on me, maybe.”

“Me?  I do know who you are.  You are Thomas Gordon.  Your mother took care of me and prayed for me when I was sick.  Hector is a—­an extremely good dog.  He would not jump at you.”

“It’s mighty lucky for him he didn’t,” bragged Thomas Jefferson, with a very creditable imitation of his father’s grim frown.  Then he sat down on the bank of the stream and busied himself with his fishing-tackle as if he considered the incident closed.

“What is it that you are trying to do?” asked Ardea, when the silence had extended to the third worm impaled on the hook and promptly abstracted therefrom by a wily sucker lying at the bottom of the pool.

“I was fishin’ some before you and your dog came along and scared all the perch away,” he said sourly.  Then, turning suddenly on her:  “Why don’t you go ahead and say it?  Is it ’cause you’re afeard to?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I know what you’re going to say; you are going to tell me this is your grandfather’s land and run me off.  But I ain’t aimin’ to go till I’m good and ready.”

She looked down on him without malice.

“You are such a funny boy,” she remarked, and there was something in her way of saying it that made Thomas Jefferson feel little and infantile and inferior, though he was sure there must be an immense age difference in his favor.

“Why?” he demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know; just because you are.  If you knew French I could explain it better that way.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name, and I don’t care,” said Thomas Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fishing.

Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool.  Then came the volcanic outburst.

“I think you are mean, mean!” she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her foot.  “I—­I want to go ho-ome!”

“Well, I reckon there ain’t anybody holdin’ you,” said Thomas Jefferson brutally.  He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such fashion as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility.  It was going to be notably easy to bully her—­another point of difference between her and Nan Bryerson.