"Boy, kindly flatter your wife, and leave tag-ends of sincerity for your mother." She tried to laugh, but the effort was not very successful.
Griff did as he was bid, and went to open the gate. At the other side stood Greta Rotherson.
"How do you do?" he observed, holding out his hand across the top bar.
"I'm very hot, rather cross, and exceedingly anxious to get under shelter. How would it be, Mr. Lomax, if you opened the gate?"
"Not just yet. I enjoy making you really angry; it brings such a quaint little flush to your cheeks."
"I don't want compliments," protested Greta, blushing rosier with pleasure all the same.
"You'll have to put up with them, I fear, if you won't change your looks. Even a staid married man like myself——"
"Married you may be, sir, but staid you will never become," said Greta, demurely. "I am going to knock at the back door, if you won't let me in at the front."
He opened at that, after weighty argument with the latch, and Greta tripped in, looking like a bit of fleecy, fair-weather cloud in her muslin dress. Griff could never quite rid himself of the notion that she was just a pretty child, and he treated her accordingly. He wondered, in a way, at the preacher's infatuation; and, with his mole-like outlook on women as a whole, he asked himself sometimes if little Greta would be able to weather foul days as well as fair.
Mrs. Lomax brightened as she saw the girl. She had a better notion of these matters than her son, and never felt the least doubt but that Greta, for all her butterfly prettiness, was just the sort of woman to come out strong in a crisis.