more discordant to Amaryllis. The
father had not been to visit his son for more than a year--she did not
want unpleasant memories stirred up.

Again in another group a sturdy labourer touched his hat and asked her
if her father was at fair, as he was looking out for a job. Old Iden
started and grunted like a snorting horse.

Amaryllis, though put out, stayed to speak kindly to him, for she knew
he was always in difficulties. Bill Nye was that contradiction a strong
man without work. He wanted to engage for mowing. Bill Nye was a mower
at Coombe, and his father, Bill Nye, before him, many a long year before
he was discovered in California.

When she overtook Iden he was struggling to pass the stream of the
Orinoco, which set strongly at that moment out of the "Lamb" towards the
"Lion." Strong men pushed out from the "Lamb" archway like a river into
the sea, thrusting their way into the general crowd, and this mighty
current cast back the tottering figure of old Iden as the swollen
Orinoco swung the crank old Spanish caravels that tried to breast it.

It was as much as Amaryllis and he together could do to hold their
ground at the edge of the current. While they were thus battling she
chanced to look up.

A large window was open over the archway, and at this window a fellow
was staring down at her. He stood in his shirt-sleeves with a
billiard-cue in his hand waiting his turn to play. It was the same young
fellow, gentleman if you like, whose pale face had so displeased her
that morning as he rode under when she watched the folk go by to fair.
He was certainly the most advanced in civilization of all who had passed
Plum Corner, and yet there was something in that pale and rather
delicate face which was not in the coarse lineaments of the "varmers"
and "drauvers" and "pig-dealers" who had gone by under the wall.
Something that insulted her.

The face at the window was appraising her.

It was reckoning her up--so much for eyes, so much for hair, so much for
figure, and as this went on the fingers were filling a pipe from an
elastic tobacco-pouch. There was no romance, no poetry in that
calculation--no rapture or pure admiration of beauty; there was a
billiard-cue and a tobacco-pouch, and a glass of spirits and water, and
an atmosphere of smoke, and a sound of clicking ivory balls at the back
of the thought. His thumb was white where he had chalked it to make a
better bridge for the cue. His face was white; for he h