"How--how can you be so uncivilized?" she returned, and there were tears
in her eyes.

"Uncivilized or not, he'll find he can't split my lip open for nothing,"
growled Archie, like a sullen child.

"You'd as well come back with us," said Abel, "the cat isn't down
there--I'd take a look in the mill."

She turned her face away, stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern
that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the bloom and
radiance had flown.

"Yes, I'll come back with you," she answered, and falling into step
between them, walked languidly up the hill to the kitchen garden at the
top. In his own misery Abel was hardly aware of her, and he heard as
from a distance, Archie's muttered threats against Gay, and Blossom's
palpitating responses. When they reached the house, Sarah's yellow and
white cat squeezed herself through the door and came purring toward
them.

"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