“I know it is,” she said; and there was an awkward pause.
“Why, would you like me to kill moles then?” she asked tentatively, after a while.
“They do us a lot of damage,” he said, standing firm on his own ground, angered.
“Well, I’ll see the next time I come across one,” she promised, defiantly. Their eyes met, and she sank before him, her pride troubled. He felt uneasy and triumphant and baffled, as if fate had gripped him. She smiled as she departed.
“Well,” said Anne, as the sisters went through the wheat stubble; “I don’t know what you two’s been jawing about, I’m sure.”
“Don’t you?” laughed Frances significantly.
“No, I don’t. But, at any rate, Tom Smedley’s a good deal better to my thinking than Jimmy, so there—and nicer.”
“Perhaps he is,” said Frances coldly.
And the next day, after a secret, persistent hunt, she found another mole playing in the heat. She killed it, and in the evening, when Tom came to the gate to smoke his pipe after supper, she took him the dead creature.
“Here you are then!” she said.