“Not enough, eh?” he asked, his eyebrows raised in amusement.  “Would five do?”

I stared at him and the colour flamed in my cheeks.

“Why, you are prettier than ever,” he said.  “If you look at me like that much longer I shall be obliged to kiss you, although I would rather wait till you came offering me a kiss.  Pretty spitfire!  Where have they been hiding you?  I had no idea, till I saw you the other day at the Creamery, that there was anything so pretty hereabouts.  I generally find out what there is delectable in the way of femininity before I am forty-eight hours in a place.  You have no idea of what an adorable little modesty you looked with your white arms plunged in the milk.  You took the shine out of the ladies, my dear.”

I could only look at him with steady animosity, while my hand on her collar kept poor Dido in check.  I saw that he took me for a peasant girl and I was not minded to enlighten him.  I was going away; and perhaps before I came back he would be gone again on his travels, for I had always heard that he was wild and a rover and could not be persuaded to settle down and live at Damerstown although his father and mother were most anxious that he should.  My heartfelt desire at the moment was that I should never again see Richard Dawson’s face, with its insolent and coarse good looks, as long as I lived.

“Yes, you took the shine out of the fine ladies that were with me that day,” he went on, “fine a conceit as they have of themselves.  They were fine London ladies, my dear, the sort that play cards all night, and motor all day, and have no time to be God-fearing and loving like the women that went before them.  You didn’t look at them?”

The speech struck me as oddly incongruous in parts of it, yet we had heard—­about the one thing we had heard in his favour—­that he was fond of his old mother, a good-natured, homely, kindly body, people said, who was rather unhappy among the Dawson riches, rather afraid of her granite-faced, beetling-browed husband.

“No, I didn’t look at them,” I said.

“And why not, pray?”

“I took no interest in them.  I did not like their way of speaking.  They seemed vulgar to me.”

I hardly knew why I answered him.  Perhaps he compelled me.  When I had answered he turned round and looked at me with an uproarious delight in his face.

“If Lady Meg could only hear you!  Lord! lord!” he said, with infinite gusto.  “The daughter of a hundred earls!  And Miss Moxon, just as high born and just as fast!  How amazed they would be.  They would box your pretty ears, my dear; at least Lady Meg would.”

“That they would not,” I answered him.  “And now, please let me pass.”

“Without a kiss?” he said mockingly.  “Very well, then, I shall let you go.  But I feel myself a poor-spirited fellow for it.  Do you know that your eyes are like wet violets?  And when do we meet again, my dear?”