Hetty was not listening.  Her eyes had caught the tinker’s, and the warm blood had run back from her face:  for he was the man who had startled the sisters on the knoll, that harvest evening.

He nodded to her now with an impudent grin.  “Good evening, missy!  If I’d known the job was for Miss Wesley, I’d ha’ put best speed into it:  best work there is already.”

“Hallo!  Do you know this fellow?” her lover demanded.

“’Fellow’—­and a moment back ’twas ‘tinker’!  Well, well, a man must look low and pick up what he can in these times, ’specially when his larger debtors be so backward—­hey, miss?  Why, to be sure I know Miss Wesley:  a man don’t forget a face like hers in a hurry.  Glad to meet her, likewise, enjoyin’ herself so free and easy.  Shall I tell the old Rector, miss, next time I call, how well you was lookin’, and in what company?”

Hetty saw her lover ruffling and laid a hand on his arm.

“Tuppence if you please, ma’am, and I’ll be going.  William Wright was never one to spoil sport:  but some has luck in this world and some hasn’t, and that’s a fact.”  He grinned again as he pocketed the money.

“If you don’t take your impudent face out of this, I’ll smash it for you,” spoke up the young man hotly.

The plumber’s grin widened as, slinging his bag of tools over his shoulder, he stepped on to the frozen towpath.  “Ah, you’re a bruiser, I dare say:  for I’ve seen you outside the booth at Lincoln Fair, hail-fellow with the boxing-men on the platform.  And a buck you was too, with a girl on each arm; and might pass, that far from home, for one of the gentry, the way you stood treat.  But you’re not:  and if missy ain’t more particular in her bucks, she’d do better with a respectable tradesman like me.  As for smashing of faces, two can play at that game, belike:  but William Wright chooses his time.”

He was lurching away with a guffaw; for the tow-path here ran within two furlongs of the high road, and a man upon skates cannot pursue across terra firma.

But he had reckoned without Hetty, who had seated herself on the edge of the barge and who now shook her feet free of Johnny Whitelamb’s rough clamps, and, springing from the deck to the towpath, took him by the collar as he turned.

“Go!” she cried, and with her open palm dealt him a stinging slap across the cheek.  “Go!”

The man put up his hand, fell back a moment with a dazed face, and then without a word ran for the highway, his bag of tools rattling behind him.

Never was route more ludicrously sudden.  Even in her wrath Hetty looked at her lover and broke into a laugh.

“Let me skate up the canal and head him off,” said he.  “Half a mile will give me lead enough to slip out of these things and collar him on the highway.”

“He is not worth it.  Besides, he may not be going towards Kelstein:  in this light we cannot see the road or what direction he takes.  Let him be, dear,” Hetty persuaded, as the old woman called out from her cabin that the kettle boiled.  “Our time is too precious.”