"What a commotion!" he said laughingly, to the flushed, deeply embarrassed girl. "But you won't mind if your grey mare gets a foal to my horse?"
"Oh no," she said. "I shall like it."
"Why not?" said he. "They'll be all right. There's the landlord and another fellow there with them. Will you come in? Have you had breakfast? Come and eat something."
She went with him into the bar parlour, where he sat down again to eat his half-cold mutton chops. She was silent and embarrassed, but not afraid. The colour still was high in her young, delicate cheeks, but her odd, bright, round, dark-grey eyes were fearless above her fear. She had really a great dread of everything, especially of the social world in which she had been brought up. But her dread had made her fearless. There was something slightly uncanny about her, her quick, rabbit-like alertness and her quick, open defiance, like some unyielding animal. She was more like a hare than a rabbit: like a she-hare that will fight all the cats that are after her young. And she had a great capacity for remaining silent and remote, like a quaint rabbit unmoving in a corner.
"Were you riding this way by accident?" he asked her.
"No," she said quickly. "I hoped I might see you. Mary said you were leaving early in the morning."
"Why did you want to see me?" he asked, amused.
"I don't know. But I did."
"Well, it was a bit of a hubbub," he laughed.
She glanced at him sharply, warily, on the defensive, and then laughed as well, with a funny little chuckle.