She was a healthy, red-cheeked, blue-eyed girl, with lips a trifle over-full and bosom to match withal. She appeared uneasy and uncertain, watching Mount when he raised a laugh, and laughing herself as excuse, though her mirth appeared to me uneasy, now that I understood her purpose.
She had been edging nearer, and now stood close to us, at the entrance to an arbour wherein were set benches in little corners, hidden from prying eyes by strips of painted cloth.
"Will no maid pity me!" exclaimed Mount. "I am far, far too young to drink my wine alone in yonder arbour!"
"I have not been invited," cried a saucy wench, laughing at us over the shoulder of her companion, who backed away, half laughing, half frightened.
"God helps those who help themselves," said Mount, turning to find her who had followed him close to his elbow.
He smiled in her face and made her a very slow and very low bow, drawing a furrow through the dust with the fluffy tail on his coon-skin cap.
"If I knew your name," he said, "I might die contented. Otherwise I shall content myself with a life of ignorance."
She seemed startled and abashed, fingering her gown and looking at her shoe-buckles, while Mount bent beside her to whisper and smile and swagger until he entreated her to taste a glass of currant wine with us in the arbour.
I do not know to this day why she consented. Perhaps she thought to confirm her suspicions and entrap some admission from Mount; perhaps, in the light of later events, her purpose was very different. However, we three sat in the arbour behind our screens of painted cloth, and Mount did set such a pace for us that ere I was aware there remained not a drop of currant in the decanter, no more cakes on the plate, and he had his arm around the silly maid.
Intensely embarrassed and ill at ease with this pot-house gallantry, which was ever offensive to my tastes, I regarded them sideways in silence, impatient for Mount to end it all.