“Don’t be angry, Martin,” she pouted. “I am just a little tired of the noise. I want to show you and the rest a new dance.”
The minx was playing her part well. She had read Evelyn Atkinson’s soul. She felt every throb of young Beckett-Smythe’s foolish heart. She was quite certain that Martin would find her and cause a scene. There was deeper intrigue afoot now than the mere folly of unlicensed frolic in the fair. Her vanity, too, was gratified by the leading rôle she filled among them all. The puppets bore themselves according to their temperaments. Evelyn bit her lip with rage and nearly yielded to a wild impulse to spring at Angèle and scratch her face. Martin was white with determination. As for Master Frank, he boiled over instantly.
“You just leave her alone, young Bolland,” he said thickly. “She came here to please herself, and can stay here, if she likes. I’ll see to that.”
Martin did not answer.
“Angèle,” he said quietly, “come away.”
Seeing that he had lived in the village nearly all his life, it was passing strange that this boy should have dissociated himself so completely from its ways. But the early hours he kept, his love of horses, dogs, and books, his preference for the society of grooms and gamekeepers—above all, a keen, if unrecognized, love of nature in all her varying moods, an almost pagan worship of mountain, moor, and stream—had kept him aloof from village life. A boy of fourteen does not indulge in introspection. It simply came as a fearful shock to find the daughter of a lady like Mrs. Saumarez so ready to forget her social standing. Surely, she could not know what she was doing. He was undeceived, promptly and thoroughly.
Angèle snatched her shoulder from his grasp.
“Don’t you dare hold me,” she snapped. “I’m not coming. I won’t come with you, anyhow. Ma foi, Frank is far nicer.”