“But she hasn’t seemed to care about them,” he said.  “I believe she has grown tired of flirting.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t flirt with them, and I think it’s all because she is pining for somebody she left at Old Church—­the miller or the rector or somebody we’ve never even heard of.”

“What’s that?” he started a little, and she saw at once that, although she had used her most delicate weapon, he had flinched from the first touch of the blade.  “I’m positive she hadn’t a real fancy for anybody down there,” he added, as he relapsed into his attitude of indifference.

“I know she says so, Jonathan, but there are other ways of telling.”

“Oh, there’s no truth in that—­it’s all nonsense,” he said irritably.

Then a door creaked in the hall, there was a rustle of silken skirts on the carpet, and Molly, having dried her tears, came in, pliant, blushing, and eager to please them both.

CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY

She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner.  He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner.  To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach.  Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause.  He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight.  As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag.  “She’s a dear good girl, and just because I’ve got myself into a mess, I’ve no idea of behaving like a cad to her,” he thought.

That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to himself with an additional emphasis—­for when the woman before him in flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness.

“What’s the matter, little girl?” he asked.

“Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church—­to-morrow!” she said.

“Why in thunder do you want to do that?”

“There’s something I must see about.  I can’t wait.  I never can wait when I want anything.”

“So I have observed.  This something is so important, by the way, that you haven’t thought of it for six months?”

“Well, I’ve thought of it—­sometimes,” she admitted.