"You!" he retorted.

"What's wrong with me?" I demanded.

"You're so absurdly alive and audacious and sensitive and
youthful-hearted, dear madam! For the life of me I can't quite fit you
into the narrow little frame you mention."

"Is it so narrow?" I inquired, wondering why I wasn't much more
indignant at him. But instead of answering that question, he asked me
another.

"Why hasn't this husband of yours fixed the windmill?" he casually
asked over his shoulder, as he resumed his tinkering on the car-engine.

"My husband's work keeps him away from home," I explained, promptly on
the defensive.

"I thought so," he announced, with the expression of a man who's had a
pet hypothesis unexpectedly confirmed.

"Then what made you think so?" I demanded, with a feeling that he was
in some way being subtler than I could quite comprehend.

"Instinct--if you care to call it that," he said as he stooped low
over his engine. He seemed offensively busy there for a considerable
length of time. I could see that he was not what in the old days I'd
have called a window-dresser. And I rather liked that pretense of
candor in his make-up, just as I cottoned to that melodious drawl of
his, not altogether unlike Lady Alicia's, with its untoward suggestion
of power and privilege. He was a man with a mind of his own; there was
no denying that. I was even compelled to remind myself that with all
his coolness and suavity he was still a car-thief, or perhaps
something worse. And I had no intention of sitting there and watching
him pitch shut-out ball.

"What are you going to do about it?" I asked, after he'd finished his
job of bailing ditch-water into his car-radiator with a little
collapsible canvas bucket.

He climbed into his driving-seat, mud to the knees, before he answered
me.

"I'm going to get Hyacinthe out of this hole," was what he said. "And
then I'm going to fix that windmill!"

"On what terms?" I inquired.

"What's the matter with a month's board and keep?" he suggested.

It rather took my breath away, but I tried not to betray the fact. He
_was_ a refugee, after all, and only too anxious to go into hiding for
a few weeks.

"Can you milk?" I demanded, deciding to keep him in his place, from
the start. And he sadly acknowledged that he wasn't able to milk.
Windmill men seldom were, he casually asserted.

"Then you'll have to make yourself handy, in other ways," I proclaimed
as he sat appraising me from his deep-pa