"So I've been told," she answered tartly.
"Jealous?"
"No," she exploded.
Slipping to the ground, he trailed his rein.
"You don't need to depend on hearing," he said, moving toward her.
"What do you mean?" she flared.
"You remember well enough--at the social down to Peterson's."
"We were children then--or I was."
"And you're not a kid now?"
"No, I'm not."
"Here's congratulations, Miss Sanderson. You've put away childish things and now you have become a woman."
Angrily the girl struck down his outstretched hand.
"After this, if a fellow should kiss you, it would be a crime, wouldn't it?" he bantered.
"Don't you dare try it, Tom Dixon," she flashed fiercely.
Hitherto he had usually thought of her as a school girl, even though she was teaching in the Willow's district. Now it came to him with what dignity and unconscious pride her head was poised, how little the home-made print could conceal the long, free lines of her figure, still slender with the immaturity of youth. Soon now the woman in her would awaken and would blossom abundantly as the spring poppies were doing on the mountain side. Her sullen sweetness was very close to him. The rapid rise and fall of her bosom, the underlying flush in her dusky cheeks, the childish pout of the full lips, all joined in the challenge of her words. Mostly it was pure boyishness, the impish desire to tease, that struck the audacious sparkle to his eyes, but there was, too, a masculine impulse he did not analyse.
"So you won't be friends?"
If he had gone about it the right way he might have found forgiveness easily enough. But this did not happen to be the right way.
"No, I won't." And she gave him her profile again.
"Then we might as well have something worth while to quarrel about," he said, and slipping his arm round her neck, he tilted her face toward him.
With a low cry she twisted free, pushing him from her.
Beneath the fierce glow of her eyes his laughter was dashed. He forgot his expected trivial triumph, for they flashed at him now no childish petulance, but the scorn of a woman, a scorn in the heat of which his vanity withered and the thing he had tried to do stood forth a bare insult.
"How dare you!" she gasped.
Straight up the stairs to her room she ran, turned the lock, and threw herself passionately on the bed. She hated him...hated him...hated him. Over and over again she told herself this, crying it into the pillows where she had hidden her hot cheeks. She would make him pay for this insult some day. She would find a way to trample on him, to make him eat dirt for this. Of course she would never speak to him again--never so long as she lived. He had insulted her grossly. Her turbulent Southern blood boiled with wrath. It was characteristic of the girl that she did not once think of taking her grievance to her hot-headed father or to her brother. She could pay her own debts without involving them. And it was in character, too, that she did not let the inner tumult interfere with her external duties.