He was aware that, all this while, from the road-side, the girl had been watching him with shining eyes: intently even: with fascination. "I suppose you think that a mighty fine performance," she said. "I didn't make a very good job of the girth," he said. "Let's get off this road." "Setting poor, weak women in their places," Miss Wannop continued. "Soothing the horse like a man with a charm. I suppose you soothe women like that too. I pity your wife. . . . The English country male! And making a devoted vassal at sight of the handy man. The feudal system all complete. . . ." Tietjens said: "Well, you know, it'll make him all the better servant to you if he thinks you've friends in the know. The lower classes are like that. Let's get off this road." She said: "You're in a mighty hurry to get behind the hedge. Are the police after us or aren't they? Perhaps you were lying at breakfast: to calm the hysterical nerves of a weak woman." "I wasn't lying," he said, "but I hate roads when there are field-paths . . ." "That's a phobia, like any woman's," she exclaimed. She almost ran through the kissing-gate and stood awaiting him: "I suppose," she said, "if you've stopped off the police with your high and mighty male ways you think you've destroyed my romantic young dream. You haven't. I don't _want_ the police after me. I believe I'd _die_ if they put me in Wandsworth . . . I'm a coward." "Oh, no, you aren't," he said, but he was following his own train of thought, just as she wasn't in the least listening to him. "I daresay you're a heroine all right. _Not_ because you persevere in actions the consequences of which you fear. But I daresay you can touch pitch and not be defiled." Being too well brought up to interrupt she waited till he had said all he wanted to say, then she exclaimed: "Let's settle the preliminaries. It's obvious mother means us to see a great deal of you. _You're_ going to be a mascot too, like your father. I suppose you think you are: you saved me from the police yesterday, you appear to have saved mother's neck to-day. You appear, too, to be going to make twenty pounds profit on a horse deal. You say you will and you seem to be that sort of a person . . . Twenty pounds is no end in a family like ours . . . Well, then, you appear to be going to be the regular _bel ami_ of the Wannop family . . ." Tietjens said: "I hope not."