“It is to seem different from what one really is—which IS wrong. Now, you are a mining superintendent, you tell me. Then you don't want to look like a Spanish brigand, as you do in that serape. I am sure if you had ridden up to a stage-coach while I was in it, I'd have handed you my watch and purse without a word. There! you are not offended?” she added, with a laugh, which did not, however, conceal a certain earnestness. “I suppose I ought to have said I would have given it gladly to such a romantic figure, and perhaps have got out and danced a saraband or bolero with you—if that is the thing to do nowadays. Well!” she said, after a dangerous pause, “consider that I've said it.”
He had been walking a little before her, with his face turned towards the distant mountain. Suddenly he stopped and faced her. “You would have given enough of your time to the highwayman, Miss Scott, as would have enabled you to identify him for the police—and no more. Like your brother, you would have been willing to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of the laws of civilization and good order.”
If a denial to this assertion could have been expressed without the use of speech, it was certainly transparent in the face and eyes of the young girl at that moment. If Falkner had been less self-conscious he would have seen it plainly. But Kate only buried her face in her lifted muff, slightly raised her pretty shoulders, and, dropping her tremulous eyelids, walked on. “It seems a pity,” she said, after a pause, “that we cannot preserve our own miserable existence without taking something from others—sometimes even a life!” He started. “And it's horrid to have to remind you that you have yet to kill something for the invalid's supper,” she continued. “I saw a hare in the field yonder.”
“You mean that jackass rabbit?” he said, abstractedly.
“What you please. It's a pity you didn't take your gun instead of your rifle.”
“I brought the rifle for protection.”
“And a shot gun is only aggressive, I suppose?”
Falkner looked at her for a moment, and then, as the hare suddenly started across the open a hundred yards away, brought the rifle to his shoulder. A long interval—as it seemed to Kate—elapsed; the animal appeared to be already safely out of range, when the rifle suddenly cracked; the hare bounded in the air like a ball, and dropped motionless. The girl looked at the marksman in undisguised admiration. “Is it quite dead?” she said timidly.
“It never knew what struck it.”
“It certainly looks less brutal than shooting it with a shot gun, as John does, and then not killing it outright,” said Kate. “I hate what is called sport and sportsmen, but a rifle seems—”