amed in my cheeks.

"Why, you are prettier than ever," he said. "If you look at me like that
much longer I shall be obliged to kiss you, although I would rather wait
till you came offering me a kiss. Pretty spitfire! Where have they been
hiding you? I had no idea, till I saw you the other day at the Creamery,
that there was anything so pretty hereabouts. I generally find out what
there is delectable in the way of femininity before I am forty-eight
hours in a place. You have no idea of what an adorable little modesty
you looked with your white arms plunged in the milk. You took the shine
out of the ladies, my dear."

I could only look at him with steady animosity, while my hand on her
collar kept poor Dido in check. I saw that he took me for a peasant girl
and I was not minded to enlighten him. I was going away; and perhaps
before I came back he would be gone again on his travels, for I had
always heard that he was wild and a rover and could not be persuaded to
settle down and live at Damerstown although his father and mother were
most anxious that he should. My heartfelt desire at the moment was that
I should never again see Richard Dawson's face, with its insolent and
coarse good looks, as long as I lived.

"Yes, you took the shine out of the fine ladies that were with me that
day," he went on, "fine a conceit as they have of themselves. They were
fine London ladies, my dear, the sort that play cards all night, and
motor all day, and have no time to be God-fearing and loving like the
women that went before them. You didn't look at them?"

The speech struck me as oddly incongruous in parts of it, yet we had
heard--about the one thing we had heard in his favour--that he was fond
of his old mother, a good-natured, homely, kindly body, people said, who
was rather unhappy among the Dawson riches, rather afraid of her
granite-faced, beetling-browed husband.

"No, I didn't look at them," I said.

"And why not, pray?"

"I took no interest in them. I did not like their way of speaking. They
seemed vulgar to me."

I hardly knew why I answered him. Perhaps he compelled me. When I had
answered he turned round and looked at me with an uproarious delight in
his face.

"If Lady Meg could only hear you! Lord! lord!" he said, with infinite
gusto. "The daughter of a hundred earls! And Miss Moxon, just as high
born and just as fast! How amazed they would be. They would box your
pretty ears, my dear; at least Lady Meg would."