"Well, can I? Can I stay to mammy’s?" asked the singing voice with its rising inflexion on the last word. "I s’pose you can," he said reluctantly. "You can go if you’m a good maid and bring me back something." "I’ll bring you back something that’ll surprise you," promised Gray, her eyes soft and smiling, but an edge of malice under her tongue. He towered over her, ardent and dominating. "There’s only one thing I want and that you know." She knew and was both angered and afraid. In vain she tried to think of Leadville as wicked, for her he was worse than that, he was terrifying. She did not know what he might do, whether there was any limit. Jim having finished harnessing the mare, came up on the other side of the wagon. Gray, glancing aside from her tormentor, saw his courageous eyes and took heart of grace. She had a protector and this was the last time, the very last, that she would be at Leadville’s mercy. "Come now, Uncle Leadville," she said and her young voice, carrying across the wagon, dissipated an incipient jealousy, "I want to be gone." He drew back as if he had received a blow and, in a moment, the girl was climbing nimbly to her place on a bag of chaff which Jim had placed ready. As she turned, a little anxious as to the effect of her words, but glad on any terms to have got away, she was met by a black scowl of wrath. "Mind I never ’ear yer call me that again." With a graceful swing, Jim sprang on to the rail of the wagon and the mare, fresh from her oats, began to move. Gray, secure at last, looked down on Byron with an air of innocent inquiry and the lad beside her smiled. For some time he had had a suspicion that the other was more attentive to her than became a married man; and this suspicion had stimulated a wooing which might otherwise have seemed too tame.