The shepherd seized another struggling and woolly one, downed him into his place, and took up the shearing-knife once more.
"Now," he said in Welsh, with a little nod to me, and I continued to work the wheel.
Mr. Price in his oilskin coat had stepped out again into the rain. Colonel Fielding did not go with him. He unfastened his brown, trench-worn mackintosh, threw it on one of the big wool-sacks, and took a pace nearer to me and my wheel.
I wondered if he had expected to see Elizabeth in the shed. Taking absolutely no notice of him I worked on.
"Let me have a turn, won't you?" came the meek voice of the intruder—for I felt, as I never had with Captain Holiday, that an intruder he was. "You take a rest, Miss Matthews."
"Thank you, I am not in the least tired." I said it coldly. I thoroughly disapproved of this young man who had been trifling with Elizabeth's feelings.
Elizabeth, bless her, was too good to be at the mercy of this young scamp with his D.S.O. and his subtle way of flirting so that you could hardly nail it down and say that it was flirting at all. Elizabeth had said hard things of Harry, in the days of my infatuation for him. But she hadn't thought any harder things of him than I thought now of this slender-waisted ruffian with the moustache that looked as if a pinch of light-gold paint had been rubbed on to his upper lip.
Cruel hard lines that he should turn out to be the one and only exception to Elizabeth's rule of hating men!
In his meekest of voices he said:
"Perhaps you are not tired. But why are you so—er—poisonously angry with me?"