"So you teach the kids their A B C's, do you? And you just out of them yourself! How many scholars have you?"
"Fourteen."
"And they all love teacher, of course. Would you take me for a scholar, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"
"No!" she flamed.
"You'd find me right teachable. And I would promise to love you, too."
Color came and went in her face beneath the brow. How dared he mock her so! It humiliated and embarrassed and angered her.
"Are you going to let me go back to my school?" she demanded.
"I reckon your school will have to get along without you for a few days. Your fourteen scholars will keep right on loving you, I expect. 'To memory dear, though far from eye.' Or, if you like, I'll send my boys up into the hills, and round up the whole fourteen here for you. Then school can keep right here in the house. How about that? Ain't that a good notion, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"
She could stand his ironic mockery no longer. She faced him, fearless as a tiger: "You villain!"
With that, turning on her heel, she passed swiftly into her little bedroom, and slammed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.
"She's sure got some devil in her," he laughed appreciatively, and he cracked another walnut.
Already he had struck the steel of her quality. She would be his prisoner because she must, but the "no compromise" flag was nailed to her masthead.
"I wonder why you are so fond of me?" he mused aloud next day when he found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.
He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full length at supple ease. Leaning on an elbow, he had been watching her for some time.
Her gaze was on the distant line of hills; on her face that far-away expression which told him that he was not on the map for her. Used as he was to impressing himself upon the imagination of women, this stung his vanity sharply. He liked better the times when her passion flamed out at him.
Now he lost his sardonic mockery in a flash of anger.
"Do you hear me? I asked you a question."
She brought her head round until her eyes rested upon him.
"Will you ask it again, please? I wasn't listening."
"I want to know what makes you hate me so," he demanded roughly.
"Do I hate you?"
He laughed irritably. "What else do you call it? You won't hardly eat at the same table with me. Last night you wouldn't come down to supper. Same way this morning. If I sit down near you, soon you find an excuse to leave. When I speak, you don't answer."