“On condition that you let me share yours, Mr. Merryweather,” insisted Gay, in his genial tone.  “If you’re going to make company of me, I shall go hungry until to-morrow.”

From a wooden safe in the corner Molly brought a plate and a cup, and made a place for the young man at the end of the red-and-white cloth on the table.  Then she turned away, without speaking, and sat down behind the tin coffeepot, which emitted a fragrant steam.

“Cream and sugar?” she inquired presently, meeting his eyes over the glass lamp which stood midway between them.

Gay had been talking to Reuben about the roads—­“jolly bad roads,” he called them, “wasn’t it possible to make them decent for riding?” Looking up at the girl’s question, he answered absently, “two lumps.  Cream?  Yes, please, a little,” and then continued to stare at her with a vague and impersonal wonder.  She was half savage, of course, with red hands, and bad manners and dressed like a boy that had got into skirts for a joke—­but, by George, there was something about her that bit into the fancy.  Not a beauty like his Europa of the pasture (who was, when it came to that?)—­but a fascinating little beggar, with a quality of sudden surprises that he could describe by no word except “iridescent.”  He liked the high arch of her brows; but her nose wasn’t good and her lips were too thin except when she smiled.  When she smiled!  It was her smile, after all, that made her seem a thing of softness and bloom born to be kissed.

Reuben ate his food rapidly, pouring his coffee into the saucer, and drinking it in loud gulps that began presently to make Gay feel decidedly nervous.  Once the young man inadvertently glanced toward him, and turning away the instant afterwards, he found the girl’s eyes watching him with a defiant and threatening look.  Her passionate defence of Reuben reminded Gay of a nesting bird under the eye of the hunter.  She did not plead, she dared—­actually dared him to criticise the old man even in his thoughts!

That Molly herself was half educated and possessed some smattering of culture, it was easy to see.  She was less rustic in her speech than his Europa, and there was the look of breeding, or of blood, in the fine poise of her head, in her small shapely hands, which he remembered were a distinguishing mark of the Gays.

“Mr. Mullen came for you in his cart,” said Reuben, glancing from one to the other of his hearers with his gentle and humble look.  “I told him you must have forgotten as you’d ridden down to the low grounds.”

“No, I didn’t forget,” replied Molly, indifferent apparently to the restraint of Gay’s presence, “I did it on purpose.”  Meeting the young man’s amused and enquiring expression, she added defiantly, “There are plenty of girls that are always ready to go with him and it’s because I’m not that he wants me.”

“He’s not the only one, to judge from what I heard at the ordinary.”