I wouldn't put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that
was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me."

Abel's face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.

"If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you'd as well stop in
the beginning," he said. "It isn't right--I'll be hanged if it is!--that
every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no
bigger than a child. It wasn't her fault, was it, if her father played
false with her mother?"

"Oh, I'm not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like
her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble
seems to be, doesn't it, merely that the men like her too much? She's
got a way with her, there's no question about that."

"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"

"I wasn't blackenin' her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt,
and you know that as well as I do--better, I shouldn't wonder."

"It's the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years
before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the
meanness of men."

"Oh, well, it's all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that
you don't go too near the fire and get scorched."

Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a
dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.