From afar Molyneux saw him coming and braced for the encounter, but Carter had gotten himself well in hand. "Miss Morrill," he said, "is real sorry she couldn't hold the ponies. But, Lordy, man, you oughtn't to have gone picking flowers."
"He's lying!" Molyneux thought, but followed the lead. "Yes, it was careless. But, you know, it is always the unexpected that happens."
"You're dead right there."
The significance caused Molyneux to redden; but he tried to carry it off easily. "And I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Carter. Can't I drive you home?"
Turning from cinching his saddle, Carter regarded him steadily. "Obliged to you, sir. I'm a bit particular in my choice of company."
The contempt stung Molyneux to retort: "You are plain-spoken, but I'm told the trait is common in Americans. Fortunately for us outsiders, your women are more complaisant."
It only led him deeper. Giving a last vicious tug at the cinch, Carter vaulted into the saddle. "Yes," he shot back, as he arranged his bridle, "they make a mistake now and then, but it don't take 'em long to find it out." And he galloped away with easy honors.
Reining in at his own door half an hour later, he regarded with astonishment a transformation which had occurred in his absence. Instead of the woman, beautiful in her angry tears, a demure girl came out to meet him. While he was gone she had bathed her red eyes, then, to relieve a headache, had let down her hair and braided it into a plait of solid gold. Thick as Carter's wrist, it hung so low that, obedient to his admiring suggestion, she easily knitted it about her waist.
"You look," he said, "more like school-girl than school-marm."
With that simple coiffure displaying the girlish line of her head and neck, she might, indeed, have easily passed for eighteen. It accentuated a wee tip-tilt of her pretty nose, a leaning to the retroussé that had been the greatest trial of her youth and still caused her occasional qualms. Could she have realized the piquancy it lent to features that, otherwise, had been too regular or have known the sensation it caused her companion as he looked down on it and her eyelashes fluttering up from eyes that were wide and grave with question.