Color came and went in her face beneath the brow. How dared he mock her
so! It humiliated and embarrassed and angered her.

"Are you going to let me go back to my school?" she demanded.

"I reckon your school will have to get along without you for a few days.
Your fourteen scholars will keep right on loving you, I expect. 'To
memory dear, though far from eye.' Or, if you like, I'll send my boys up
into the hills, and round up the whole fourteen here for you. Then
school can keep right here in the house. How about that? Ain't that a
good notion, Miss Going-On-Eighteen?"

She could stand his ironic mockery no longer. She faced him, fearless as
a tiger: "You villain!"

With that, turning on her heel, she passed swiftly into her little
bedroom, and slammed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock.

"She's sure got some devil in her," he laughed appreciatively, and he
cracked another walnut.

Already he had struck the steel of her quality. She would be his
prisoner because she must, but the "no compromise" flag was nailed to
her masthead.

"I wonder why you are so fond of me?" he mused aloud next day when he
found her as unresponsive to his advances as a block of wood.

He was lying in the sand at her feet, his splendid body relaxed full