Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore him was a fresh charm.  Before, while she implored him to come into the house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened girl had made her appeal.  Now that her grandmother had returned, and she was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.

This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when, having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from the hob, turned toward the door.

“You haven’t gone then?” said she.

“No!”

She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.

“You won’t be advised?”

She was passing him swiftly, with the manner of a busy housewife, when Max, encouraged by her new reserve, and a demure side-look, which was not without coquetry, seized the hand which held the kettle, and asked her if he was to get no thanks for coming to her assistance as he had done.

“I did thank you,” said she, not attempting to withdrew her hand, but standing, grave and with downcast eyes, between him and the door.

“Well, in a way, you did.  But you didn’t thank me enough.  You yourself admit it was a bold thing for a stranger to do!”

The girl looked suddenly up into his face, and again he saw in her expressive eyes a look which was altogether new.  Like flashes of lightning the changes passed over her small, mobile features, to which the absence of even a tinge of healthy pink color gave, perhaps, an added power of portraying the emotions which might be agitating her.  There was now something like defiance in her eyes.

“What was your boldness compared to mine?” said she.  “You are a man; you have strong arms, at any rate, I suppose.  I am only a girl, and you are a gentleman, and gentlemen are not chivalrous.  Who dared the most then, you or I?”

“So gentlemen are not chivalrous?” said Max, ignoring the last part of her speech.  “All gentlemen are not, I suppose you mean?  Or rather, all the men who ought to be gentlemen?”

“No,” answered the girl, stubbornly.  “I mean what I said.  You with the rest.  You’d act rightly toward a man, I suppose, as a matter of course.  You can’t act rightly toward a woman, a girl, without expecting to be paid for it.”

Max was taken aback.  Here was a change, indeed, from the poor, clinging, pleading, imploring creature of twenty minutes before.  He reddened a little and let her hand slip from his grasp.

“I believe you are right,” he said, at last, “though you are rather severe.  But let me tell you that the word ‘chivalry’ is misleading altogether.  It is applied to those middle-aged Johnnies—­no, I mean those Johnnies of the Middle Ages—­who were supposed to go about rescuing damsels in distress, isn’t it?  Well, you don’t know what happened after the rescue was effected; but I like to suppose, myself, that the girl didn’t just say ‘Thanks—­awfully’ and cut him dead forever afterward.”