"I think she would if he'd give her the chance," the girl answers, smiling.
"What a queer little creature you are!" her lover says, looking at her with amused yet wondering eyes. "How on earth did you find it all out? I'll vow Honor never spoke a word to you about it."
"How do I know that the sun is shining or that there is clover in that meadow? Haven't I my senses like other people?"
So they pass on their way, laughing and happy; and the man coming out from the shelter of the larch-wood, which here borders the high-road, looks after them with a frown, and a word that is certainly not a blessing on his bearded lips.
"It's not your fault," he says to himself bitterly, as he watches the two sauntering along in the yellow sunlight, "that she cares for Power Magill, or that she ever cared for him, for that matter."
As he stands there in his well-worn shooting-coat, although he is dressed little better than one of his own keepers, no one could mistake him for other than a gentleman. He is a handsome man, with keen hazel eyes set far back under brows as dark as a Spaniard's, but his face, for all its comeliness, is almost forbidding in its sternness.
Turning off the road now, he makes his way across a field and down some rude stone steps to the bank of the river.
A little house stands here, nestling against the rocky bank. The old door hangs off its hinges, the one small-paned window is stuffed with rags.
Power Magill stoops as he enters the poor place, and his eyes, dazzled by the sunlight outside, look round the room in a vain search. He can see no one; a girl rises from a low stool by the hearth, where she has been coaxing a smoldering turf to light, and comes forward.
"Is your father in, Patsy?"