"You will not, I see," concluded the girl, moving away; "rest easy, I shall say nothing to Harry about it. I don't know what he would do if he heard of it."
She began to walk toward the ford, every motion expressing contempt. She believed she had proved Graham a coward, and this had rehabilitated her self-respect. She was no longer ashamed before him. At the water's brink she turned back.
"And remember this, Mr. Jack Graham!" she cried, her repressed anger suddenly blazing out; "I may be young, and I may not know much of the world, but I know enough to take care of myself without any of your help."
She picked her way across the stepping-stones and disappeared, without once looking back.
XXVI
AND HAS TO GO TO WORK
From that moment Graham ceased to be an integral factor in the girl's history. His only hold on her imagination had been his moral superiority, and it was now gone. She treated him thenceforth as an admirer whose sincerity deserves the consideration which his insistence makes difficult to give ungrudgingly. He was not discouraged or frowned on. He was forgiven promptly as a child is forgiven. But he was kept always scrupulously to his place. The girl now held the whip hand. After a little, when he became too insistent, she cut him cruelly in punishment and only deigned to smile on him again when, to sue forgiveness, he had quite abandoned his attitude of fault-finding.
As for him, the girl's actions soon became hateful. He saw them all wrong, yet he felt his powerlessness to alter them in even the slightest degree. This aroused so powerful but so impotent a rage that shortly he came to react irritably against everything Molly did whether right or wrong. He instinctively arraigned himself in the opposition. He did not want to do this, and his common sense accused him strongly of unreasonableness, but he could not help it. It was greater than he. No matter what the plan, discussion or even conversation, his morbidly sensitive consciousness of the girl's error impelled him to object.
"Let's go over to Rockerville to-day," she would suggest.