"By the way, I wish you would make Molly Peterkin understand how it was I came away so hastily. Tell her I haven't forgotten her, and give her the little turquoise pin I'm sending. It just matches her eyes. Be sure to let me know if she's as pretty as ever." By the next mail the turquoise brooch arrived, and Christopher, putting it in his pocket, went over to Sol Peterkin's to bear the message to the girl. As it happened, she was swinging on the little sagging gate when he came up the lane, and at sight of him her eyebrows shot up under her flaxen curls, which hung low upon her forehead. She was a pretty, soulless little animal, coloured like peach-blossoms, and with a great deal of that soft insipidity which is usually found in a boy's ideal of maiden innocence. "Why, I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw you," she said, arranging her curls over her left shoulder with a conscious simper. The old Blake gallantry rose to meet her challenging eyes, and he regarded her smilingly a moment before he answered. "Well, I could hardly believe mine, you know," he responded carelessly. "I thought for an instant that a big butterfly had alighted on the gate." She pouted prettily. "Won't you come in?" she asked after a moment, with an embarrassed air, as she remembered that he was one of the "real Blakes" for whom her father used to work. A light retort was on his lips, but while he looked at her a little weary frown darkened her shallow eyes, and with the peculiar sympathy for all those oppressed by man or nature which was but one expression of his many-sided temperament he quickly changed the tone of his reply. At the instant it seemed to him that Molly Peterkin and himself stood together defrauded of their rightful heritage of life; and as his thought broadened he felt suddenly the pathos of her forlorn little figure, of her foolish blue eyes, of her trivial vanities, of her girlish beauty, soiled and worn by common handling. A look very like compassion was in his face, and the girl, seeing it, reddened angrily and kicked at a loose pebble in the path. When he went away a moment later he left a careless message for Sol about the tobacco crop, and the little white box containing the turquoise brooch was still in his pocket. That afternoon the trinket went back to Will with a curt letter. "If you take my advice, you'll leave Molly Peterkin alone," he wrote in his big, unformed hand, "for as far as I can see you are too good a match to get on well together. She's a fool, you know, and from the way you're going on just now it looks very much as if you were one also. At any rate, I'm not your man for gallantries. I'd rather hunt hares than women, any day--and game's plentiful just now."