done with themselves down here for the last twenty years?  Two thousand acres?  Damn it!  I’d rather have six feet on the good English soil!  Came to get rid of one woman, did he?—­and tumbled into a pretty puddle with another as soon as he got here.  By George, it’s in the bone and it is obliged to come out in the blood.  A Gay will go on ogling the sex, I suppose, as long as he is able to totter back from the edge of the grave.”

As he approached the blazed pine, a spot of darkness, which he had at first mistaken for a small tree, detached itself from the surrounding shadows, and assumed gradually a human shape.  His immediate impression was that the shape was a woman and that she was young.  With his next breath he became aware that she was also beautiful.  In the fading light her silhouette stood out as distinctly against the mellow background of the sky, as did the great pine which marked the almost obliterated path over the fields.  Her dress was the ordinary calico one, of some dull purplish shade, worn by the wives and daughters of the neighbouring farmers; and on her bare white arm, with its upturned sleeve, she carried a small split basket half filled with persimmons.  She was of an almost pure Saxon type—­tall, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, with a skin the colour of new milk, and soft ashen hair parted smoothly over her ears and coiled in a large, loose knot at the back of her head.  As he reached her she smiled faintly and a little brown mole at the corner of her mouth played charmingly up and down.  After the first minute, Gay found himself fascinated by this single imperfection in her otherwise flawless features.  More than her beauty he felt that it stirred his blood and aroused in him the physical tenderness which he associated always with some vague chivalrous impulse.

She moved slightly when he dismounted beside her, and a number of small splotches of black circling around her resolved themselves into a bodyguard of little negroes, clad in checked pinafores, with the scant locks wrapped tightly with crimson cotton.

“May I let down the bars for you?” he asked, turning to look into her face with a smile, “and do you take your collection of piccaninnies along for protection or for amusement?”

“Grandma doesn’t like me to go out alone, sir—­so many dreadful things happen,” she answered gently, with an utter absence of humour.  “I can’t take anybody who is at work, so I let the little darkies come.  Mary Jo is the oldest and she’s only six.”

“Is your home near here?”

“I live at the mill.  It’s a mile farther on, but there is a short cut.”

“Then you are related to the miller, Mr. Revercomb—­that fine looking chap I met at the ordinary?”

“He is my uncle.  I am Blossom Revercomb,” she answered.

“Blossom?  It’s a pretty name.”

Her gaze dwelt on him calmly for and instant, with the faintest quiver of her full white lids, which appeared to weigh heavily on her rather prominent eyes of a pale periwinkle blue.