“Why, the cat’s got back!” exclaimed Archie.

“It must have been in the store-room all the time,” returned Blossom quickly.  “I forgot to look there.  Now, I must go and pour out the butter milk for dinner before grandma scolds me.”

She turned away, glanced back an instant later to make sure that they had entered the house, and then gathering up her Sunday skirt of blue Henrietta cloth, started in a rapid run back along the path to the willows.  When she reached a sheltered nook, formed by a lattice of boughs, she found Gay walking impatiently back and forth, with his hands in his pockets and the anxious frown still on his forehead.  At sight of her, his face cleared and he held out his arms.

“My beauty!—­I’d just given you up.  Five minutes more by my watch, and I should have gone.”

“I met Abel and Archie as I was coming and they made me go back with them,” she answered, placing her hand on her bosom, which rose and fell with her fluttering breath.  It was characteristic of their different temperaments that, although he had seen her every day for three weeks, he still met her with outstretched arms, which she still evaded.  Since that first stolen kiss, she had held off from him, alluring yet unapproachable, and this gentle, but obstinate, resistance had inflamed him to a point which he admitted, in the cold grey morning before he had breakfasted, to have become positively dangerous.  Ardently susceptible to beauty, the freedom of his life had bred in him an almost equal worship of the unattainable.  If that first kiss had stirred his fancy, her subsequent repulse had established her influence.  The stubborn virtue, which was a part of the inherited fibre of her race, had achieved a result not unworthy of the most finished coquette.  Against his desire for possession there battled the instinctive chastity that was woven into the structure of Sarah Revercomb’s granddaughter.  Hardly less violent than the natural impulse against which it warred, it gave Blossom an advantage, which the obvious weakness of her heart had helped to increase.  It was as though she yearned toward him while she resisted—­as though she feared him most in the moment that she repulsed him.

“Good God! how beautiful you are and how cold!” he exclaimed.

“I am not cold.  How can you say so when you know it isn’t true?”

“I’ve been waiting here an hour, half dead with impatience, and you won’t so much as let me touch you for a reward.”

“I can’t—­you oughtn’t to ask me, Mr. Jonathan.”

“Could a single kiss hurt you?  I kissed you once.”

“It’s—­it’s because you kissed me once that you mustn’t kiss me again.”

“You mean you didn’t like it?”

“What makes you so unkind?  You know it isn’t that.”

“Then why do you refuse?” He was in an irritable humour, and this irritation showed in his face, in his movements, in the short, abrupt sound of his words.