Nance had never in all her life been treated by a stranger quite in the way this worthy man treated her, for not only did he return upon his steps immediately after he had passed her, but he permitted his eyes, both in passing and repassing, to search her smilingly up and down from her boots to the top of her head, precisely as if he were a connoisseur in a gallery observing the “values” of a famous picture.
And yet, for she was not by any means oblivious to such distinctions, the girl was unable to feel even for one second that this surprising admirer was anything but a gentleman—a gentleman, however, with very singular manners. That she certainly did feel. And yet, she liked him, liked him before he uttered a word, liked him with that swift, irrational, magnetic attraction which, with women even more than with men, is the important thing.
Passing her for the third time he suddenly darted into the grass, and with a movement so comically impetuous that though she gave a start she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely presented them to her, saying as he did so, “Perhaps you’ll be annoyed at leaving these behind—or do you wish them at the devil?”
Nance took them from him and smiled frankly into his face.
“I suppose I oughtn’t to have picked them,” she said. “People don’t like dandelions brought into houses.”
“What an Attic chin you have!” was the stranger’s next remark. There was such an absence in his tone of all rakish or conventional gallantry that the girl still felt she could not repulse him.
“You are staying here—in Rodmoor?” he went on.
Nance explained that she had come to live with Miss Doorm.