“She never used to do it till you went over to Mr. Mullen’s church and fell in love with Molly Merryweather.  Great Scott, I’m glad I don’t stand in either of your shoes when it comes to that.  Life’s too short to pay for your religion or your sweetheart every day you live.”

“It would have been the same anyway—­she’s put out with me about nothing.  I had a right to go to Old Church if I wanted to, and what on earth has she got against Mr. Mullen anyway, except that he couldn’t recite the first chapter in Chronicles?  What kind of religion does that take I’d like to know?”

The meal poured softly out of the valve into the trough beneath, and lifting a wooden scoop he bent over and scattered the pile in the centre.  A white dust had settled on his hair and clothes, and this accentuated the glow in his face and gave to his whole appearance a picturesque and slightly theatrical cast.

“If it hadn’t been Molly, it would have been some one else,” he added impulsively.  “Ma would be sure to hate any woman she thought I’d fallen in love with.  It’s born in her to be contrary just as it is in that hopvine out yonder that you can’t train up straight.”

“All the same, if I were going through fire and water for a girl, I’d be pretty sure to choose one that would make it worth my while at the end.  I wouldn’t put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me.”

Abel’s face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.

“If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you’d as well stop in the beginning,” he said.  “It isn’t right—­I’ll be hanged if it is!—­that every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no bigger than a child.  It wasn’t her fault, was it, if her father played false with her mother?”

“Oh, I’m not blaming her, am I?  As far as that goes all the women like her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children.  The trouble seems to be, doesn’t it, merely that the men like her too much?  She’s got a way with her, there’s no question about that.”

“Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?”

“I wasn’t blackenin’ her character.  I merely meant that she was a flirt, and you know that as well as I do—­better, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“It’s the way she was brought up.  Her mother was crazy for ten years before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the meanness of men.”

“Oh, well, it’s all right,” said Archie carelessly, “only look out that you don’t go too near the fire and get scorched.”

Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.