“Good-looking?  I should think not—­a fat fop like that.”

“Is he fat?  I didn’t notice it—­but, of course, I didn’t mean that he was good-looking in your way, Abel.”

The small flowerlike shadows trembled across her face, and beneath her feet the waves churned a creamy foam that danced under her like light.  His eyes warmed to her, yet he held back, gripped by a passion of jealousy.  For the first time he felt that he was brought face to face with a rival who might prove to have the advantage.

“I am coming over!” called Molly suddenly, and a minute later she stood in the square sunshine that entered the mill door.

Had he preserved then his manner of distant courtesy, it is probable that she would have melted, for it was not in her temperament to draw back while her prey showed an inclination for flight.  But it was his nature to warm too readily and to cool too late, a habit of constitution which causes, usually, a tragedy in matters of sex.

“You oughtn’t to treat me so, Molly!” he exclaimed reproachfully, and made a step toward her.

“I couldn’t help forgetting, could I?  It was your place to remind me.”

Thrust, to his surprise, upon the defensive he reached for her hand, which was withdrawn after it had lain an instant in his.

“Well, it was my fault, then,” he said with a generosity that did him small service.  “The next time I’ll remind you every minute.”

She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her unkindness even, were but the sportive and innocent freaks of a child.  In his rustic sincerity he was forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the appealing sweetness of her look.  He told himself twenty times a day that she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that in her heart she was to blame for her flirting.  A broad and charitable distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that she did.  It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of which she was still unconscious.

“Molly,” he burst out almost fiercely, “will you marry me?”

The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her forehead.

“I’ve told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody,” she answered, “but that if I ever did—–­”

“Then you’d marry me.”

“Well, if I were obliged to marry somebody, I’d rather marry you than anybody else.”

“So you do like me a little?”

“Yes, I suppose I like you a little—­but all men are the same—­mother used always to tell me so.”

Poor distraught Janet Merryweather!  There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of his paradise.  He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met and passed through some hour of despair and disillusionment.