He expected to see Nip’s owner outside. In his reading of the situation she had arrived so late that while she was hesitating whether to come in, the shameless dog had burst through the door, attracted doubtless by the aroma of all those dinner-packets, and this had made her still more ashamed to enter. But the quaint little street was bare of Jinny. So sunless did it appear without her, that he scarcely noticed that the sky was actually overcast again, and that the black cloud had regathered. He stood still, hesitating; in which relaxed mood of his the spasmodic struggles of the animal were successful, and Will became painfully aware that he was alone with his moist trousers and his London coat snowed over with little hairs, while Nip, after some preliminary gambollings and barkings at the recovery of the liberty he had himself abandoned, was vanishing into the High Street. So assured were Nip’s movements that Will divined at once he had only to follow him to restore him to his mistress, and without waiting even to brush off the little white hairs, he darted towards the street corner, and was happily just in time to see the excellent creature trotting into the courtyard of “The Black Sheep.”

His pleasure was not, however, free from surprise. What was Jinny doing at her business headquarters on the Lord’s Day? Or had she come in her cart to chapel, and put it up there? He ran towards the picturesque stable-yard. There were a good many chaises, gigs, dog-carts and even carriages standing—the countryside drove to its churches—but there was no trace of either Jinny or Methusalem, while Nip was standing with hang-dog air by the doorstep, under a poster of “Duke’s Marionettes.” But as Will drew nearer, he turned tail, sauntered down the passage, surveyed the painted hand, and then with an air of decision bounded up the stairs. Ah, she would be in the parlour! And Nip’s follower bounded upstairs too, keeping closely to heel. But no! Nip was not on dining bent, though the door was open. Rejecting all the appetizing scents that already emanated from the eating-room, Nip pit-patted along the dusky corridor and began whining and scrabbling outside a closed and numbered door. Very soon it receded before his pleadings; and as he scampered in, “You poor dog!” came out in the girlish voice that had so lacerated him with “Fol de rols!” But not the worst of that musical torment could vie with the jar to his heart-strings when, through the reclosing door, came another unforgettable voice with the jovial interrogatory: “Well, Nip, and what was the parson’s text?”

He remembered now—with a cold sick horror—that this was the very bedroom from which indignant housemaids had excluded its tenant—yes, there was Reynard opposite with his glassy eye and his erected brush. Possibly Tony Flip was not even up. That was what came of minxes driving Methusalems! Instead of being at divine service, like all God-fearing humanity, she was coquetting—or worse—with a mountebank in an inn bedroom. Yet he felt he must not spy upon her—any moment, too, she might come out—and he hurried downstairs and stood on the step under the ironwork lamp, louring like the great black cloud, which he now perceived to be in heaven-sent harmony with his mood. And that drivelling patriarch had foamed at the mouth when he had hinted that woman’s place was not a cart!

But Jinny did not keep him more than five endless minutes.

“Hullo, Will,” she cried gaily, as she tripped from the passageway with Nip in her arms. “What are you doing here?”

How the broad frame of her bonnet set off the picture of her face! Small wonder a loose-living showman found it bewitching. Not so William Flynt—with his high ideals of womanhood! Even to be called “Will” was provoking rather than flattering: he felt it now less the perquisite of the old friend than the proof of an indiscriminating levity.

“I’ve come for the dinner,” he said coldly. Nip gazed straight at him with his mild brown eye, but although Will did not suppose that the brute would open its mouth like Balaam’s ass and give him away, he could not look it in the head. He turned his shoulder on dog and damsel and stared at the poster.

“I wish I could have dinner with you,” replied Jinny frankly. “But I must be off to feed Gran’fer. Farmer Gale’s trap should be here by now.”

“He drives you home too?” He turned towards her, startled.

“Within half a mile—it is a treat for me to have another carrier.”

“But he isn’t a Peculiar,” he observed severely.

“No, he’s a Wesleyan like Gran’fer, who used to drive his father about. He puts up at ‘The Chequers’ hard by his chapel—his service ought to be over. I hope his horse hasn’t taken fright again—we had just got to the High Street when the storm broke, and at the first flash the horse was off, galloped miles beyond the town before he could be got to a standstill.”

“He might have killed you, the silly!” cried Will, meaning the farmer.

“Yes,” said Jinny simply, meaning the animal. “By the time he was walked warily back, it was too late to go in. But I don’t wonder Nip was worried about me. You see he likes to run behind the trap, poor fellow”—she wasted a kiss upon his unresponsive head—“and he always comes up in time to say good-bye at the chapel door, where he hangs about till I come out. But this time, of course, he must have been wandering about in search of me. He wasn’t there when I passed just now. Mr. Flippance declares he must have gone to Chipstone Church, in the idea I’d suddenly joined it.”

And the girlish laugh rang out, dissipating some of his humours as much by its joyousness as by the innocent mention of the Showman.

“But why shouldn’t you join it, Miss Quarles?” he said. “It can’t be duller than chapel.”

“Now, now, Will.” She shook a serious finger. “You ought to have gone to chapel yourself this morning. And don’t call me Miss Quarles.”

“But I prefer to call you Miss Quarles.”

“But why not Jinny?” Her voice was plaintive.

“Because everybody else calls you that.”

“Is that any reason why you should call me Miss Quarles?”

“If you can’t see it——!” he began.

“I can’t, and I hope you won’t call me Miss Quarles.”

“And why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I won’t answer to it.”

“And why not?”

“Because, Will, it’s not my name.”

He gasped. “Not your name?”

She laughed merrily at his discomfiture. “It’s a long story and Farmer Gale will be here. Hulloa,” she went on, making his confusion worse confounded, “how did Nip’s hairs get on you?”

He flushed, and flicked nervously at his coat. “There are other white dogs,” he said evasively.

“Well, don’t let him spoil your coat.”

“And what about your bodice?”

“Oh, mine isn’t new and Londony.”

He was gratified at her perception: still more at her setting down Nip. That animal, however, was in the rampageous mood which always followed his restoration to freedom, and he began leaping up at his mistress’s hand.

“Down, Nip, down! Oh, I do believe he’s bitten through my new glove!” She pulled it off ruefully to examine the damage.

“Sensible dog!” Will growled. “He knows you oughtn’t to be wearing Mr. Flippance’s gloves.”

Her own little white teeth flashed out in a mocking smile: “Lucky you are going to buy me another pair!”

“Me! Why, you wouldn’t let me when I offered.”

“Of course not. I’m thinking of the pair you’ll be owing me.”

“Owing you?”

“You don’t suppose you’ll win the wager, do you?”

“Oh, that!” He was disconcerted again. “Of course I’ll win it,” he said defiantly in a bombastic burst. “It won’t take me a day’s practice to blow down the walls of Jericho.”

She laughed. “So you do remember your Bible. Well, I’ll be satisfied if you blow Nip back from a rabbit.”

“We shall see. Have you superscribed again?” he asked pompously, assured of his accuracy this time.

“Not yet—I expect the horn’ll be at Chipstone by Tuesday—you shall have it the same evening.”

“And the next day I’ll be wanting gloves,” he said loftily.

“We shall see—or rather hear. What size do you take, though?”

“Oh, I don’t know—twice yours, I suppose.”

“Oh, not twice!”

“Why, sure!” And he suddenly prisoned her little ungloved hand between his brawny palms. “I could easily crush it,” he said, with a strange desire to do so, pressing it indeed almost to hurting-point. At that instant a far-palpitating blueness transfigured the courtyard, and from above-stairs came a terrific racket as if all the plates and dishes in the dining-room were hurling themselves at one another. Will felt the girl’s fingers curl spasmodically round his and hold them tight: her face went white, and he seemed to hear her heart thumping.

“Don’t be frightened!” he said, with his first manly satisfaction in her. Surely she was clinging to him for protection.

“That’ll be a fireball down the chimney,” she observed with disappointing coolness. “There was one came down last year in Long Bradmarsh and killed a poor little chimney-sweep who had got stuck in the flue. It’ll set the chimney on fire, I expect.”

“This rain will put it out,” he said, still cheerfully conscious of her warm fingers, and feeling a joy in the deluge that had been so damp in his father’s company. She drew back, however, into the passage to avoid the big plopping and ricochetting rain-drops and her hand got disentangled. “What fun if it’s fallen down Mr. Flippance’s chimney,” she laughed. “Make him get up early.”

Her laughter seemed to ring untrue, hysterical.

“Isn’t he up yet?” he asked, trying to speak lightly.

“Oh, he never gets up on a Sunday—not properly, I mean. I saw him half up, but he’s gone back to bed and is already snoring—I heard him.”

“But how could you hear him?” he asked, with careful carelessness.

“Oh, I was in his daughter’s room, whiling away the time of waiting—she’s got ten times his sense—when, woke up by our voices, I suppose, in he trails through the communicating door in his fancy dressing-gown, yawning like a mouse-trap, and asks me to buy him a horse at the fair.”

“A horse at the fair!” Scarcely had he enjoyed the relief of working out that he had taken the harmless adjoining bedroom for the Showman’s, when this new blow struck him, like hooves on his chest.

“Of course I wouldn’t listen to him,” she said.

“Of course not!” His breast expanded again. “How can a woman understand buying horses?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that.” Jinny was distinctly colder. “I mean it’s the Lord’s Day. He’ll have to repeat his order on Tuesday.”

“But surely you wouldn’t go to a horse fair?”

“Why not?”

“Because—it’s—it’s so horsey.”

She laughed again. “And so fairish, too, isn’t it?”

“What does he want a horse for?” he asked sullenly.

“I don’t suppose it’s for dinner—he isn’t a Frenchy. But he’s got a caravan, hasn’t he?—and he has to begin his summer tour soon.”

“And why can’t he buy his own horses?”

“That infant? Why his last horse died of old age at four!”

“And what about that sensible daughter of his?”

“She hasn’t got horse-sense,” said Jinny, smiling.

“Well, I don’t see how it comes into your business.”

“A carrier has to buy whatever she’s asked.”

“Whatever she can carry. You can’t carry a horse.”

“No, but it can carry me. Besides, I’ve often carried a calf or a pig, and where am I to draw the line?”

“You’ll be buying elephants next,” he said, with a bitter remembrance of Mr. Flippance’s story.

“I’m too old for gingerbread,” she replied unexpectedly. “But I haven’t forgotten the one you gave me once.” He trembled under her radiant gratitude, with its evocation of the poetry of childhood. But a convulsive bound forward on the part of Nip broke up the argument. “Ah, here’s Farmer Gale coming along,” she said cheerfully.

Just like the fellow, he thought, to come just at that moment. And his resentment at the arrival of the dog-cart was not even mitigated by the watery spectacle presented by its red-faced driver, whose personable and still youthful figure rose from a streaming tarpaulin, to which a hat with an unremoved mourning-band contributed its drippings.

“You can’t go in that rain,” Will protested. “Let him go without you—I’ll order a trap myself.”

“But you said you were dining here—I can’t wait.”

He winced—his white lie had come home like a curse to roost.

“You can dine with me!”

“And what about Gran’fer?”

“Well, I can dine at home.” But she scarcely heard him. She was already fastening a handkerchief over her Sunday bonnet—a fascinating process. “There’s a good cover—I’ll snuggle right in.”

Shameless, he thought, riding about cheek by jowl and skirt by trouser with a young man not even of her own faith. That thin tiny boy sandwiched between was no real separation: why, the tarpaulin almost swallowed him under! They ought at least to sit back to back, and if there was any chivalry in the pudding-faced lout, he would transfer the tarpaulin to the back seat. How could Jinny forget that the magnate of Little Bradmarsh—cursÈd Cornish interloper—was no fit company for the likes of her? He wondered that people did not warn her: but they were inured to her vagaries, he supposed. And even if the man meant honourably, in his reckless passion, how dare a widower with a great thumping boy approach a rosebud? Ah, now she was talking to this second-hand, warmed-up aspirant, who had already killed off one wife; inquiring sweetly about his animal’s behaviour under the recent flash.

“Steady as a plough-horse!” came the cheery reply. “My eye, Jinny, you did handle him wonderful. I reckon you saved my life!”

“And what about my own?” With a laugh whose gaiety stabbed, she sprang upon the step. “Good-bye, Will. Hope you’ll enjoy your dinner.”

“Good-bye, Miss Quarles,” he said coldly. “I mean, Miss——” But before he had realized he could not fill up the blank, the trap had started, and he could not even bound behind, like the joyous-barking Nip. Nothing tangible was left of the whole delectable and distressing episode except some white hairs on the fashionable fabric of Moses & Son.