"I suppose it was for my mother's good that she kept her from going to church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?"

"That's an old story—you were only a month old. Can't you forget it?"

"I'll never forget it—not even at the Day of Judgment. I don't care how I'm punished."

Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture.

"It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.

"If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen."

He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill.

For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?"

"I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."

"I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly."

"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?"

"I shouldn't have cared—it would have been better than your expression at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to."

"Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you."

"I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away from him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow, "I've seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, and I've hated them for it."

"What I can't understand," he pursued, not without bitterness, "is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn't married should put up with it for an instant?"

At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough.

"The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look in a man's face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose."

"I know it isn't you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet—-"

She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.

"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel," she said.

A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity? She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred. I've got no belief in it—I've got no belief in anything, that is the trouble. I'm twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the mill-race."

A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the old family carriage from Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver?

"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the walk."

"We've brought an overcoat—Kesiah and I—a good thick one, for your grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad during the snow storms."

Molly's face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.

"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness. "I've been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself."

Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay's salts. She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her, almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being. Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born.

"Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?"

The girl nodded. "He took supper at our house the night he got here."

"It was such a surprise. Was he looking well?"

"Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know."

"Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won't get in, child? Well, drive on, Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage."

Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated after the wheels.



CHAPTER VI

TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE

As the carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-turbaned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight.

"Take the bird cage, Abednego, I've bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay. "Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas."

She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to grasp more effectively at all the privileges. She was clinging and small and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresistible appeal to emotions.

"Where is Jonathan?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me."

"So I do, dearest mother—so I do," replied the young man, running hurriedly down the steps and then slipping his arm about her. "You came a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in the drive."

Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way into the house and placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room.

"I am afraid the journey has been too much for you," he said tenderly. "Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a glass of wine."

"Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows just how much is good for me."

Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister. In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, flat curls, as though an artificial ugliness were less reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty.

In the midst of the long room flooded with sunshine, the little lady reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the glass Kesiah had handed her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this same delicate colour was reflected in the rich brocaded gowns in the family portraits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar logs that burned on the old andirons.

"So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother," murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peacock hand-screen.

"I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here—and, by Jove, it's worse even than I imagined! How the deuce have you managed to drag out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of barbarians?"

"It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your uncle's account and that I am only following his wishes in making the place my home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfulness of it."

"Quiet! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I'd choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."

"You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are trying."

"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"

"One doesn't have amusement when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or two in the summer. I can't walk of course, because of my heart, and as there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise—(poor dear mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the other did)—but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn again unless a gentleman was with her."

"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.

Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above the peacock feathers she waved gently before her.

"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."

"But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at her."

"She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing, and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter—I can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S—saw one of her sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I remember, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Burwell and asked him to come down and win mother over. He came immediately, for he was the kindest soul, but, of course after he understood, he decided against it. Why on earth should a girl want to go streaking across the water to study art, he asked, when she had a home she could stay in and men folk who could look after her? They both told her she made herself ridiculous when she talked of ambition, and as they wouldn't promise her a penny to live on, she was obliged in the end to give up the idea. She nursed mother very faithfully, I must say, as long as she lived, never leaving her a minute night or day for the last year of her illness. Don't misjudge poor Kesiah, Jonathan, she has a good heart at bottom, though she has always been a little soured on account of her disappointment."

"Oh, she was cut out for an old maid, one can see that," rejoined Gay, only half interested in the history of his aunt, for he seldom exerted his imagination except under pressure of his desires, "and, by the way, mother, what kind of man was my Uncle Jonathan?"

"The dearest creature, my son, heaven alone knows what his loss meant to me! Such consideration! Such generosity! Such delicacy! He and Kesiah never got on well, and this was the greatest distress to me."

"Did you ever hear any queer stories about him? Was he—well—ah, wild, would you say?"

"Wild? Jonathan, I am surprised at you! Why, during the twenty years that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in my presence."

"I don't mean that exactly—but what about his relations with the women around here?"

She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow.

"Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question."

Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb.

"Ah, that's just it," commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on the picture. After a minute of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over his discretion and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate question. "What about old Reuben Merryweather's granddaughter? Has she been provided for?"

For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver. Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered." The quaint peacock screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf.

"Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad," she replied, and her tone added, "but what can I do about it? I am a woman and should know nothing of such matters!"

"Was she mentioned in my uncles's will, do you remember?"

His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sudden firmness of outline, and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the resolve of the moment. Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair which had worn thin on the temples, three frowning wrinkles leaped out as if in response to some inward pressure.

"There was something—I can't remember just what it was—Mr. Chamberlayne will tell you about it when he comes down to-morrow to talk over business with Kesiah. They keep all such things away from me out of consideration for my heart. But I've never doubted for an instant that your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter. He sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remember, and there was a bequest of some sort, I believe—something that she comes into on her twenty-first birthday."

"She isn't twenty-one then, is she?"

"I don't know, Jonathan, I really can't remember."

"Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?"

"Oh, she can and she will—but Kesiah is so violent in all her opinions! I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathan's name to me because she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about him."

She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white fur rug at her feet.

"If you'll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I'll go upstairs for a rest," she said gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you."

All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.

An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing, she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely—rebelled against nature, against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister's lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these—some external shaping of clay—had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's advancement—a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her—yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been—a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she—but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished sentiment—it put an end to rebellion.

"Miss Kesiah, dar's Marse Reuben in de hall en he sez he'd be moughty glad ef'n you'd step down en speak a wud wid 'im."

"In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things."

Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bonnet with a hurried movement, she stabbed them into the hard round pincushion on her bureau, and after throwing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted gaze.

At the foot of the staircase, the old man was standing in a patient attitude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog-like look in the eyes.

In response to Kesiah's greeting, he explained that he had come at once to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects."

"I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood.

"It will be very useful to me, ma'am, when I am out of doors in bad weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit.

"We got it for that purpose," and becoming more embarrassed, she added hastily, "How is the red cow, Mr. Merryweather?"

"She mends slowly, ma'am. I am givin' her bran mash twice a day and keepin' her in the barn. Have you noticed the hogs? They're a fine lot this year and we'll get some good hams at the killin'."

"No, I hadn't looked at them, but I've been struck with the corn you've brought up recently from the low grounds."

For a minute or two they discussed the crops, both painfully ill at ease and uncertain whether to keep up the conversation or to let it trail off into silence. Then at the first laboured pause, Reuben repeated his message to Mrs. Gay and stamped slowly out of the back door into the arms of Jonathan, who was about to enter.

"Halloo! So it's you!" exclaimed the young man in the genial tone which seemed at once to dispel Kesiah's embarrassment. "I've wanted to talk with you for two days, but I shan't detain you now for I happen to know that your granddaughter is hunting for you already. I'll come up to-morrow and chat awhile in the barn."

Reuben bowed and passed on, a little flattered by the other's intimate tone, while Gay followed Kesiah into the drawing-room, and put a question to her which had perplexed him since the night of his arrival.

"Aunt Kesiah, was old Reuben Merryweather on friendly terms with my uncle?"

She started and looked at him with a nervous twitching of her eyelids.

"I think so, Jonathan, at least they appeared to be. Old Reuben was born on the place when the Jordans still lived here, and I am sure your uncle felt that it would be unjust to remove him. Then they fought through the war together and were both dangerously wounded in the same charge."

He gazed at her a moment in silence, narrowing his intense blue eyes which were so like the eyes of Reuben's granddaughter.

"Did my uncle show any particular interest in the girl?" he inquired, and added a little bitterly, "It's not fair to me that I shouldn't know just where I am standing."

"Yes, he did show a particular interest in her and was anxious that she should be educated above her station. She was even sent off to a boarding-school in Applegate, but she ran away during the middle of the second session and came home. Her grandfather was ill with pneumonia, and she is sincerely devoted to him, I believe."

"Was there any mention of her in Uncle Jonathan's will?"

"None whatever. He left instructions with Mr. Chamberlayne, however, which are to be made known next April on Molly's twenty-first birthday. It is all rather mysterious, but we only know that he owned considerable property in the far West, which he left away from us and in trust to his lawyer. I suppose he thought your mother would not be alive when the girl came of age; for the doctors had agreed that she had only a few years to live at the utmost."

"What in the devil did my poor mother have to do with it?"

She hesitated an instant, positively scowling in her perplexity.

"Only that I think—I believe your Uncle Jonathan would have married the girl's mother—Janet Merryweather—but for your mother's influence."

"How in the deuce! You mean he feared the effect on her?"

"He broke it to her once—his intention, I mean—and for several days afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him promise—he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela—that he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you know."

"But what became of the girl—of Janet Merryweather, I mean?"

"That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago—twenty years—that people have almost forgotten. It seems that your uncle had been desperate about her for a time—before Angela came to live with him—and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind—perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the neighbourhood."

"Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but, I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to Janet Merryweather and to his brother's widow?"

"There was a difference, of course. Janet Merryweather could hardly have had Angela's sensitive feelings—or at least it's a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming—but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its possession."

She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly.

"Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan—"The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of—a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half a century produced him, but he's here to stay, of that I am positive. After all, why shouldn't he, when we get down to the question? He—or the stock he represents, of course—is already getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us—we're losing grip—and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes from."

"Ah, it's just that—pluck—but put the miller in the crucible and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office—she was one of the real Carters, you know—would hardly bend her head."

"Perhaps you're right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?"



CHAPTER VII

GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS

At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak.

"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance."

Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but a condemnation."

With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him, and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with muzzles held close to the moist ground.

For a minute Gay's angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot. Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.

"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you're not only shooting my partridges, but you're actually shooting them before my eyes."

"What's that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were you after that bird yourself then?"

"Well, rather, my friend, and I'll trouble you at the same time to hand over that string on your shoulder."

"Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why, I shot them."

"But you shot them on my land didn't you?"

"What in the devil do you mean by that? My folks have shot over these fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn't happen to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your pasture."

"Do you mean to tell me that you don't respect a man's right to his game?"

"A man's game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we're not going to keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he's got a better right to it."

The assumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour, if it had not enraged him.

"All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next time I find you trespassing on my land, I'll have the law after you."

"The law—bosh! Do you think I'm afraid of it?"

Somewhere at the back of Gay's brain, a curtain was drawn, and he saw clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained.

"If you think I'll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent rascals as you, you're mistaken, young man," he returned.

The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie's gun, which had been levelled at him. The boy's face was white under his sunburn, and the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as though a strong wind were blowing.

"Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county doesn't know that you're another blackguard like your uncle before you. Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in his company!"

His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other struck him full in the mouth.

"Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage!"

Then as he stooped for his gun, which he had laid down, a shot passed over his head and whizzed lightly across the meadow.

"The next time I'll take better aim!" called Archie, turning away. "I'll shoot as straight as the man who gave your uncle his deserts down at Poplar Spring!"

Whistling to his dogs, he ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream which flowed down from the mill.

While he watched him the anger in Gay's face faded slowly into disgust.

"Now I've stirred up a hornet's nest," he thought, annoyed by his impetuosity. "Who, I wonder, was the fellow, and what a fool—what a tremendous fool I have been!"

With his love of ease, of comfort, of popularity, the situation appeared to him to be almost intolerable. The whole swarm would be at his head now, he supposed; for instead of silencing the angry buzzing around his uncle's memory, he had probably raised a tumult which would deafen his own ears before it was over. Here, as in other hours and scenes, his resolve had acted less as a restraint than as a spur which had impelled him to the opposite extreme of conduct.

Still rebuking his impulsiveness, he shouldered his gun again, and followed slowly in the direction Archie had taken. The half bared willows by the brook distilled sparkling drops as the small red sun rose higher over the meadows, and it was against the shimmering background of foliage, that the figure of Blossom Revercomb appeared suddenly out of the mist. Her scant skirts were lifted from the cobwebs on the grass, and her mouth was parted while she called softly after a cow that had strayed down to the willows.

"You, sir!" she exclaimed, and blushed enchantingly under the pearly dew that covered her face. "One of our cows broke pasture in the night and we think she must have crossed the creek and got over on your side of the meadow. She's a wonderful jumper. We'll have to be hobbling her soon, I reckon."

"Do you milk?" he asked, charmed by the mental picture of so noble a dairymaid.

"Except when grandma is well enough. You can't leave it to the darkies because they are such terrible slatterns. Put a cow in their hands and she's sure to go dry before three months are over."

She looked up at him, while the little brown mole played hide and seek with a dimple.

"Have you ever been told that you are beautiful, Miss Keren-happuch?" he inquired with a laugh.

Her pale eyes, like frosted periwinkles, dropped softly beneath his gaze.

"How can you think so, sir, when you have seen so many city ladies?"

"I've seen many, but not one so lovely as you are this morning with the frost on your cheeks."

"I'm not dressed. I just slip on any old thing to go milking."

"It's not the dress, that doesn't matter—though I can imagine you in trailing purple velvet with a trimming of sable."

An illumination shone in her face, as if her soul had suddenly blossomed.

"Purple velvet, and what else did you say, sir?" she questioned.

"Sable—fur, you know, the richest, softest, queenliest fur there is."

"I'd like to see it," she rejoined.

"Well, it couldn't improve you!—remember always that the fewer fine clothes you have on the better. Tell me, Blossom," he added, touching her shoulder, "have you many lovers?"

She shook her head. "There are so few about here that any woman would look at."

"I've been told that there's an engaging young rector."

"Mr. Mullen—well, so he is—and he preaches the most beautiful sermons. But he fancies Molly Merryweather, they say, like all the others, though he won't be likely to marry anybody from around here, I suppose."

Her drawling Southern tongue lent a charm, he felt, to her naive disclosures.

"Like all the others?" he repeated smiling. "Do you mean to tell me that Reuben's piquant little granddaughter is a greater belle in the neighbourhood than you are?"

"She has a way with them," said Blossom sweetly. "I don't know what it is and I am sure she is a good, kind girl—but I sometimes think men like her because she is so contrary. My Uncle Abel has almost lost his head about her, yet she plays fast and loose with him in the cruelest fashion."

"Oh, well, she'll burn her fingers some day, at her own fire, and then she'll be sorry."

"I don't want her to be sorry, but I do wish she'd try just a little to be kind—one day she promises to marry Abel and the next you'd think she'd taken a liking to Jim Halloween."

"Perhaps she has a secret sentiment for the rector?" he suggested, to pique her.

"But I don't believe he will marry anybody around here," she insisted, while the colour flooded her face.

The discovery that she had once cherished—that she still cherished, perhaps, a regard for the young clergyman, added a zest to the adventure, while it freed his passion from the single restraint of which he had been aware. It was not in his nature to encourage a chivalrous desire to protect a woman who had betrayed, however innocently, a sentiment for another man. When the Reverend Mr. Mullen inadvertently introduced an emotional triangle, he had changed the situation from one of mere sentimental dalliance into direct pursuit. By some law of reflex action, known only to the male mind at such instants, the first sign that she was not to be won threw him into the mental attitude of the chase.

"Are the fascinations of your Mr. Mullen confined to the pulpit?" he inquired after a moment, "or does he wear them for the benefit of the heterodox when he walks abroad?"

"Oh, he's not my Mr. Mullen, sir," she hastened to explain though her words trailed off into a sound that was suspiciously like a sigh.

"Molly Merryweather's Mr. Mullen, then?"

"I don't think he cares for Molly—not in that way."

"Are you quite as sure that Molly doesn't care for him in that way?"

"She couldn't or she wouldn't be so cruel. Then she never goes to lectures or Bible classes or mission societies. She is the only girl in the congregation who never makes him anything to wear. Don't you think," she asked anxiously, "that if she really cared about him she would have done some of these things?"

"From my observation of ladies and clergymen," replied Gay seriously, "I should think that she would most likely have done all of them."

She appeared relieved, he thought, by the warmth of his protestation. Actually Mr. Mullen had contributed a decided piquancy to the episode.

"I'm afraid, Blossom," he said after a moment, "that I am beginning to be a little jealous of the Reverend Mullen. By the way, what is the Christian name of the paragon?"

"Orlando, sir."

"Ye Gods! The horror grows! Describe him to me, but paint him mildly if you wish me to survive it."

For a minute she thought very hard, as though patiently striving to invoke a mental image.

"He's a little taller than you, but not quite—not quite so broad."

"Thank you, you have put it mildly."

"He has the most beautiful curly hair—real chestnut—that grows in two peaks high on his forehead. His eyes are grey and his mouth is small, with the most perfect teeth. He doesn't wear any moustache, you see, to hide them, and they flash a great deal when he preaches—-"

"Hold on!"

"I beg you pardon, sir."

"I mean that I am overcome. I am mentally prostrated before such perfections. Blossom, you are in love with him."

"Oh, no, sir; but I do like to watch him in the pulpit. He gesticulates so beautifully."

"And now—speak truth and spare not—how do I compare with him?"

"Oh, Mr. Jonathan, you are so different!"

"Do you imply that I am ugly, Blossom?"

"Why, no—not ugly. Indeed I didn't mean that."

"But I'm not so handsome as Reverend Orlando?—now, confess it."

She blushed, and he thought her confusion the most charming he had ever seen.

"Well, perhaps you aren't quite so—so handsome; but there's something about you, sir," she added eagerly, "that reminds me of him."

"By Jove! You don't mean it!"

"I can't tell just what it is, but it is something. You both look as though you'd lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes without remembering that they are your Sunday clothes. Of course, your hair doesn't curl like his," she added honestly, "and I doubt if you'd look nearly so well in the pulpit."

"I'm very sure I shouldn't, but Blossom—-"

"What, Mr. Jonathan?"

"Do you think you will ever like me as well as you like Mr. Mullen?"

His gay and intimate smile awaited her answer, and in the pause, he stretched out his hand and laid it on her large round arm a little above the elbow. The flush deepened in her face, and he felt a slight trembling under his fingers like the breast of a frightened bird.

"Blossom," he repeated, half mocking, half tender, "do you think you will ever like me better than you like Mr. Mullen?"

At this her rustic pride came suddenly between them, and withdrawing her arm from his clasp, she stepped out of the bridle path into the wet orchard grass that surrounded them.

"I've known him so much longer," she replied.

"And if you know me longer will you like me better, Blossom?"

Then as she still drew back, he pressed nearer, and spoke her name again in a whisper.

"Blossom—Blossom, are you afraid of me? Do you think I would hurt you?"

The gentleness in his voice stayed her flight for an instant, and in that instant, as she looked up at him, he stooped quickly and kissed her mouth.

"What a damned ass I've made of myself," he thought savagely, when she broke from him and fled over the mill brook into the Revercombs' pasture beyond. She did not look back, but sped as straight as a frightened hare to the covert; and by this brilliant, though unconscious coquetry, she had wrested the victory from him at the moment when it had appeared to fall too easily into his hands.

"Well, it's all right now. I'll take better care in the future," he thought, his self-reproach extinguished by the assurance that, after all, he had done nothing that justified the intrusion of his conscience. "By Jove, she's a beauty—but she's not my kind all the same," he added as he strolled leisurely homeward—for like many persons whose moral standard exceeds immeasurably their ordinary rule of conduct, he cherished somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain an image of perfection closely related to the type which he found least alluring in reality. Humanly tolerant of those masculine weaknesses he shared, he had erected mentally a pinnacle of virtue upon which he exacted that a frailer being should maintain an equilibrium. A pretty woman, it was true, might go at a merry pace provided she was not related to him, but he required that both his mother and his aunt should be above suspicion. In earlier days he had had several affairs of sentiment with ladies to whom he declined to bow if he happened to be walking with a member of his family; and this fine discrimination was characteristic of him, for it proved that he was capable of losing his heart in a direction where he would refuse to lift his hat.

At the late breakfast to which he returned, he found Mr. Chamberlayne, who had ridden over from Applegate to consult with Kesiah. In appearance the lawyer belonged to what is called "the old school," and his manner produced an effect of ostentation which was foreign to his character as a Christian and a gentleman. His eyebrows, which were still dark and thick, hung prominently over his small, sparkling eyes behind gold rimmed spectacles, while a lock of silver hair was brushed across his forehead with the romantic wave which was fashionable in the period when Lord Byron was the favorite poet. Kindness and something more—something that was almost a touching innocence, looked from his face. "It is a good world—I've always found it to be a good world, and if I've ever heard anything against it, I've refused to believe it," his look seemed to say.

All through breakfast he rambled on after his amiable habit—praising the food, praising the flowers, praising the country, praising the universe. The only creature or object he omitted to praise was Kesiah—for in his heart he regarded it as an outrage on the part of Providence that a woman should have been created quite so ugly. While he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly through the window or at a portrait of Mrs. Gay, painted in the first year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard. In the mental world which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with a quality which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be attributed, he disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing above her head. In his long and intimate acquaintance, he had never looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to. He was perfectly aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with her. No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man's ideal of what the sex should be. When he spoke of her behind her back it was with indignant sympathy as "poor Miss Kesiah," or "that poor good soul Kesiah Blount"—for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he harboured at the bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah's plainness was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.

"Any sport, Jonathan?" he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his waffles. "If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did at least fifty."

"No, I didn't get a shot," replied Gay, "but I met a poacher on my land who appeared to have been more successful. There seems to be absolutely no respect for a man's property rights in this part of the country. The fellow actually had the impudence to stop and bandy words with me."

"Well, you mustn't be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot over your fields for generations, and he'd probably look upon an attempt to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges."

"Do you mean that the landowner is utterly unprotected?"

"By no means—go slow—go slow—you might search the round globe, I believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours. But they've always been taught, you see, to regard the bird in the air as belonging to the man with the gun. On these large estates game was so plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few, that it didn't pay a man to watch out for his interest. Now that the birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman to concern himself in the matter."

"Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose. I wonder who he was, by the way—young, good looking, rather a bully?"

"The description fits a Revercomb. As they are your next neighbours it was probably the miller or his brother."

"I know the miller, and it wasn't he—but when I come to think of it, the youngster had that same rustic look to him. By Jove, I am sorry it was a Revercomb," he added under his breath.

A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the prosecution.

"They are an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in her presence.

A little later, when the two men were smoking in the library, Gay brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had so hastily dropped it.

"Am I likely, then, to have trouble with the Revercombs?" he asked, with a disturbing memory of Blossom's flaxen head under the hooded shawl.

"It's not improbable that the family will take up the matter. These country folk are fearful partisans, you see. However, it may lead to nothing worse than the miller's refusing to grind your corn or forbidding you to use the bridle path over his pasture."

"Had my uncle any friction in that quarter when he lived here?"

Mr. Chamberlayne's cigar had gone out while he talked, and striking a match on a silver box, he watched the thin blue flame abstractedly an instant before he answered.

"Were you ever told," he inquired, "that there was some talk of arresting Abner Revercomb before the coroner's jury agreed on a verdict?"

"Abner? He's the eldest of the brothers, isn't he? No, I hadn't heard of it."

"It was only the man's reputation for uprightness, I believe, that prevented the arrest. The Revercombs are a remarkable family for their station in life, and they derive their ability entirely from their mother, who was one of the Hawtreys. They belong to the new order—to the order that is rapidly forging to the surface and pushing us dilapidated aristocrats out of the way. These people have learned a lot in the last few years, and they are learning most of all that the accumulation of wealth is the real secret of dominance. When they get control of the money, they'll begin to strive after culture, and acquire a smattering of education instead. It's astonishing, perhaps, but the fact remains that a reputable, hard-working farmer like our friend the miller, with his primitive little last century grist-mill, has probably greater influence in the State to-day than you have, for all your two thousand acres. He has intelligence enough to go to the Legislature and make a fair showing, if he wants to, and I don't' believe that either of us could stand in the race a minute against him."

"Well, he's welcome to the doubtful honour! But the thing that puzzles me is why in thunder his brother Abner should have wanted to shoot my uncle?"

"It seems—" the lawyer hesitated, coughed and glanced nervously at the door as if he feared the intrusion of Kesiah—"it seems he was a lover—was engaged in fact to Janet Merryweather before—before she attracted your uncle's attention. Later the engagement was broken, and he married a cousin in a fit of temper, it was said at the time. There was always ill blood after this, it appeared, and on the morning of your uncle's death Abner was seen crossing the pasture from Poplar Spring with his gun on his shoulder."

"It's an ugly story all round," remarked Gay quietly, "and I wish to heaven that I were out of it. How has my poor mother stood it?"

"She has known very little about it," Mr. Chamberlayne answered, while his jutting eyebrows twitched nervously as he turned away. "Your mother, my dear boy, is one of those particularly angelic characters from whose presence even the thought of evil is banished. You have only to look into her face to discern how pure and spotless she has kept her soul. My old friend Jonathan was very devoted to her. She represented, indeed, the spiritual influence in his life, and there was no one on earth whose respect or affection he valued so highly. It was his consideration for her alone that prevented him from making a most unfortunate marriage."

"The girl died insane, didn't she?"

"It was a distressing—a most distressing case; but we must remember, in rendering our verdict, that if Janet Merryweather had upheld the principles of her sex, it would never have happened."

"We'll rest it there, then—but what of her daughter? The child could hardly have been accessory before the fact, I suppose?"

An expression of suffering patience came into the old gentleman's face, and he averted his gaze as he had done before the looming countenance of Kesiah.

"Your uncle rarely spoke to me of her," he answered, "but I have reason to know that her existence was a constant source of distress to him. He was most anxious both to protect your mother and to provide generously for the future of Janet's daughter.

"Yet I understand that there was no mention of her in his will."

"This omission was entirely on your mother's account. The considerable property—representing a third of his entire estate—which was left in trust to me for a secret purpose, will go, of course, to the girl. In the last ten years this property has practically doubled in value, and Molly will take possession of the income from it when she reaches her twenty-first birthday. The one condition is that at Reuben's death she shall live with your aunt."

"Ah," said Jonathan, "I begin to see."

"At the time, of course, he believed that your mother would survive him only a few months, and his efforts to shield her from any painful discoveries extended even after his death. His wish was that the girl should be well educated and prepared for any change in her circumstances—but unfortunately she has proved to be rather a wilful young person, and it has been impossible entirely to fulfil his intentions with regard to her. Ah, he wasn't wise always, poor Jonathan, but I never doubted that he meant well at bottom, however things may have appeared. His anxiety in the case of your mother was very beautiful, and if his plans seem to have miscarried, we must lay the blame after all, on the quality of his judgment, not of his heart."

"And the girl will be twenty-one next April, I am told?"

"Her birthday is the seventeenth, exactly ten years from the date of Jonathan's death."



CHAPTER VIII

SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL

At dusk that evening the miller, who had spent the day in Applegate, stopped at Bottom's Ordinary on his way home, and received a garbled account of the quarrel from the farmers gathered about the hospitable hearth in the public room. The genius of personality had enabled Betsey Bottom to hold open doors to the traveller long after the wayside tavern in Virginia had passed from the road and the one certain fact relating to the chance comer was that he never came. By combining a store with a public house, she managed still to defy the progress of time as well as the absence of guests. "Thank the Lord, I've never been one to give in to changes!" it was her habit to exclaim.

The room was full of tobacco smoke when Abel entered, and as he paused, in order to distinguish the row of silhouettes nodding against the ruddy square of the fireplace, Adam Doolittle's quavering voice floated to him from a seat in the warmest corner. The old man was now turning ninety, and he had had, on the whole, a fortunate life, though he would have indignantly repudiated the idea. He was a fair type of the rustic of the past generation—slow of movement, keen of wit, racy of speech.

"What's this here tale about Mr. Jonathan knockin' Archie down an' settin' on him, Abel?" he inquired. "Ain't you got yo' hand in yet, seein' as you've been spilin' for a fight for the last fortnight?"

"I hadn't heard of it," replied Abel, his face flushing. "What in hell did he knock Archie down for?"

"Jest for shooting' a few birds that might as well have been flying about on yo' land as on his, if thar minds had been set over toward you."

"Do you mean Mr. Jonathan got into a quarrel with him for hunting on his land? Why, we shot over those fields for a hundred years before the first damned Gay ever came here."

"So we have—so we have, but it seems we ain't a-goin' to do so any longer if Mr. Jonathan can find a way to prevent it. Archie was down here jest a minute or two arter you went by this mornin', an' he was swearin' like thunder, with a busted lip an' a black eye."

A smarting sensation passed over Abel, as though the change to the warm room after the cold outside were stinging his flesh.

"Well, I wish I had been there," he retorted, "somebody else would have been knocked down and sat on if that had happened."

"Ah, so I said—so I said," chuckled old Adam. "Thar ain't many men with sech a hearty stomach for trouble, I was jest sayin' to Solomon."

Bending over the fire, he lifted a live ember between two small sticks, and placing it in the callous palm of his hand, blew softly on it an instant before he lighted his pipe.

"What goes against my way of thinkin'," remarked Betsey Bottom, wiping a glass of cider on her checked apron before she handed it to Abel, "is that so peaceable lookin' a gentleman as Mr. Jonathan should begin to start a fuss jest as soon as he lands in the midst of us. Them plump, soft-eyed males is generally inclined to mildness whether they be men or cattle."

"'Taint nothin' on earth but those foreign whims he's brought back an' is tryin' to set workin' down here," said Solomon Hatch. "If we don't get our backs up agin 'em in time, we'll find presently we don't even dare to walk straight along the turnpike when we see him a comin'. A few birds, indeed!—did anybody ever hear tell of sech doin's? 'Warn't them birds in the air?' I ax, 'an' don't the air belong to Archie the same as to him?'"

"It's because he's rich an' we're po', that he's got a right to lay claim to it," muttered William Ming, a weakly obstinate person, to whose character a glass of cider contributed the only strength.

"You'd better hold yo' tongue, suh," retorted his wife, "it ain't yo' air anyway, is it?"

"I reckon it's as much mine as it's Mr. Jonathan's," rejoined William, who, having taken a double portion, had waxed argumentative. "An' what I reason is that birds as is in the air ain't anybody's except the man's that can bring 'em down with a gun."

"That's mo' than you could do," replied his wife, "an' be that whether or no, it's time you were thinkin' about beddin' the grey mule, an' she ain't in the air, anyhow. If I was you, Abel," she continued in a softer tone, "I wouldn't let 'em make me so riled about Mr. Jonathan till I'd looked deep in the matter. It may be that he ain't acquainted with the custom of the neighbourhood, an' was actin' arter some foolish foreign laws he was used to."

"I'll give him warning all the same," said Abel savagely, "that if I ever catch him on my land I'll serve him in the fashion that he served Archie."

"You don't lose nothin' by goin' slow," returned Solomon. "Old Adam there is a born fire eater, too, but he knows how to set back when thar's trouble brewin'."

"I ain't never set back mo' than was respectable in a man of ninety," croaked old Adam indignantly, while he prodded the ashes in his corncob pipe with his stubby forefinger. "'Tis my j'ints, not my sperits that have grown feeble."

"Oh, we all know that your were a gay dog an' a warnin' to the righteous when you were young," rejoined Solomon, in an apologetic manner, "an' it must be a deal of satisfaction to be able to look back on a sinful past when you've grown old and repented. I've been a pious, God-fearing soul from my birth, as you all know, friends, but sad to relate, I ain't found the solid comfort in a life of virtue that I'd hoped for, an' that's the truth."

"The trouble with it, Solomon," replied old Adam, pushing a log back on the andirons with his rough, thick soled boot to which shreds of manure were clinging, "the trouble with it is that good or bad porridge, it all leaves the same taste in the mouth arter you've once swallowed it. I've had my pleasant trespasses in the past, but when I look backward on 'em now, to save my life, I can't remember anything about 'em but some small painful mishap that al'ays went along with 'em an' sp'iled the pleasure. Thar was the evening I dressed up in my best clothes an' ran off to Applegate to take a yellow haired circus lady, in pink skirts, out to supper. It ought to have been a fine, glorious bit of wickedness to remember, but the truth was that I'd put on a new pair of boots, an' one of 'em pinched so in the toes that I couldn't think of another thing the whole blessed evening. 'Tis al'ays that way in my experience of life—when you glance back or glance befo' 'tis pleasant enough to the eye, but at the moment while you're linin' it thar's al'ays the damn shoe that pinches."

"Ah, you're right, you're right, Mr. Doolittle," remarked William Ming, who had lingered in the doorway to follow the conversation.

"It's life, that's what it is," commented Solomon, heaving a sigh that burst a button hole in his blue shirt. "An' what's mo' than life, it's marriage. When I see the way some men wear themselves out with wantin' little specks of women, I say to myself over an' over agin, 'Ah, if they only knew that thar ain't nothin' in it except the wantin'.'"

"Not another thing—not another blessed mite of a thing," agreed William, who had imbibed secretly again behind the back of his wife.

"I've know a man to throw himself into the river from sheer love befo' marriage," said Solomon, "an' two weeks arter the woman had taken him, to fall out with her because she'd put too much shortenin' in his pie-crust."

"It's all love befo' marriage an' all shortenin' arterwards," observed Betsey Bottom, with scorn. "I've al'ays noticed in this world that the less men folks have to say for themselves the better case they make of it. When they've spent all thar time sence Adam tryin' to throw dust in the eyes of women, it would be better manners if they'd stop twittin' 'em because they'd succeeded."

"True, true, you never spoke a truer word, ma'am, in my acquaintance with you," responded Solomon, with what hasty gallantry he could summon. "I was thinkin' them very things to myself when you mentioned 'em. Not that anybody could throw dust in yo' eyes, even if he tried to."

"Well, it would take mo'n a man to do that, I reckon," she replied, amiably enough, "I saw through 'em early, an' when you've once seen through 'em it's surprisin' how soon the foolishness of men begins to look like any other foolishness on earth."

She was listened to with respectful and flattering attention by her guests, who leaned forward with pipes in hand and vacant, admiring eyes on her still comely features. It was a matter of gossip that she had refused half the county, and that her reason for marrying William had been that he wasn't "set," and would be easy to manage. The event had proved the prophecy, and to all appearance it was a perfectly successful mating.

Abel was the first to move under her gaze, and rising from his chair by the fire, he took up his hat, and made his way slowly through the group, which parted grudgingly, and closed quickly together.

"Take a night to sleep on yo' temper Abel," called Solomon after him, "and git a good breakfast inside of you befo' you start out to do anything rash. Well, I must be gittin' along, folks, sad as it seems to me. It's strange to think, now ain't it—that when Nannie was married to Tom Middlesex an' livin' six miles over yonder at Piping Tree, I couldn't have got over that road too fast on my way to her."

"You'd still feel like that, friend, if she were still married to Tom Middlesex," quavered old Adam. "'Tis the woman we oughtn't to think on that draws us with a hair."

"Now that's a case in p'int," replied Solomon, nodding after the vanishing figure of Abel. "All his wits are in his eyes, as you can tell jest to look at him—an' for sech a little hop-o'-my-thumb female that don't reach nigh up to his shoulder."

"I can't see any particular good looks in the gal, myself," remarked Mrs. Bottom, "but then, when it's b'iled down to the p'int, it ain't her, but his own wishes he's chasin'."

"Did you mark the way she veered from him to Mr. Jonathan the other day?" inquired William Ming, "she's the sort that would flirt with a scarecrow if thar warn't anything else goin'."

"The truth is that her eyes are bigger than her morals, an' I said it the first time I ever seed her," rejoined old Adam. "My taste, even when I was young, never ran to women that was mo' eyes than figger."

Still discoursing, they stumbled out into the dusk, through which Abel's large figure loomed ahead of them.

"A man that's born to trouble, an' that of the fightin' kind—as the sparks fly upward," added the elder.

As the miller drove out of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft murmurs in the moist hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places. In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey background of sky.

Half a mile farther on, where his road narrowed abruptly, a voice hallooed to him as he approached, and driving nearer he discerned dimly a man's figure standing beside a horse that had gone lame.

"Halloo, there? Have you a light? My horse has got a stone or cast a shoe, I can't make out which it is."

Reaching for the lantern under his seat, Abel alighted and after calling "Whoa!" to his mare, walked a few steps forward to the stationary horse and rider in the dusk ahead. As the light shone on the man and he recognized Jonathan Gay, he hesitated an instant, as though uncertain whether to advance or retreat.

"If I'd known 'twas you," he observed gruffly, "I shouldn't have been so quick about getting down out of my gig."

"Thank you, all the same," replied Gay in his pleasant voice. "It doesn't seem to be a stone, after all," he added. "I'm rather afraid he got a sprain when he stumbled into a hole a yard or two back."

Kneeling in the road, Abel lifted the horse's foot, and felt for the injury with a practised hand.

"Needs a bandage," he said at last curtly. "I happen to have a bottle of liniment in the gig."

The light glided like a winged insect over the strip of corduroy road, and a minute later the pungent odour of the liniment floated to Gay's nostrils.

"Give me anything you have for a compress," remarked the miller, dropping again on his knees. "Pick a few of those Jimson weeds by the fence and lend me your handkerchief—or a couple of them would be still better. There, now, that's the best I can do," he added after a moment. "Lead him slowly and be sure to look where you're going."

"I will, thank you—but can you find your way without the lantern?"

"Hannah can travel the road in the dark and so can I for that matter. You needn't thank me, by the way. I wouldn't have troubled about you, but I've a liking for horses."

"A jolly good thing it was for me that you came up at the instant. I say, Revercomb, I'm sorry it was your brother I got into a row with this morning."

"Oh, that's another score. We haven't settled it yet," retorted the Miller, as he stepped into his gig. "You've warned us off your land, so I'll trouble you to keep to the turnpike and avoid the bridle path that passes my pasture."

Before Gay could reply, the other had whistled to his mare and was spinning over the flat road into the star-spangled distance.

When the miller reached home and entered the kitchen, his mother's first words related to the plight of Archie, who sat sullenly nursing his bruised mouth in one corner.

"If you've got any of the Hawtrey blood in yo' veins you'll take sides with the po' boy," she said. "Thar's Abner settin' over thar so everlastin' mealy mouthed that he won't say nothin' mo' to the p'int than that he knew all the time it would happen."

"Well, that's enough, ain't it?" growled Abner; "I did know it would happen sure enough from the outset."

"Thar ain't any rousin' him," observed Sarah, with scorn. "I declar, I believe pa over thar has got mo' sperit in him even if he does live mostly on cornmeal mush."

"Plenty of sperit in me—plenty of sperit," chirped grandfather, alert as an aged sparrow that still contrives to hop stiffly in the sunshine.

"Oh, yes, he's sperit left in him, though he's three years older than I am," remarked grandmother, with bitterness. "He ain't wo' out with work and with child bearin' befo' he was ninety. He ain't bald, he ain't toothless," she concluded passionately, as if each of grandfather's blessings were an additional insult to her. "He can still eat hard food when he wants it."

"For pity's sake, be quiet, ma," commanded Sarah sternly, at which the old woman broke into sobs.

"Yes, I must be quiet, but he can still talk," she moaned.

"Tell me about it, Archie," said Abel, drawing off his overcoat and sitting down to his supper. "I passed Jonathan Gay in the road and he asked me to bind up his horse's sprain."

"He'd be damned befo' I'd bind up a sprain for him!" burst out Archie, with violence. "Met me with a string of partridges this morning and jumped on me, blast him, as if he'd caught me in the act of stealing. I'd like to know if we hadn't hunted on that land before he or his rotten old uncle were ever thought of?"

"Ah, those were merry days, those were!" piped grandfather. "Used to go huntin' myself when I was young, with Mr. Jordan, an' brought home any day as many fine birds as I could carry. Trained his dogs for him, too."

"Thar was al'ays time for him to go huntin'," whimpered grandmother.

"What are you goin' to do about it, Abel?" asked Sarah, turning upon him with the smoking skillet in her hand.

At the question Blossom Revercomb, who was seated at work under the lamp, raised her head and waited with an anxious, expectant look for the answer. She was embroidering a pair of velvet slippers for Mr. Mullen—a task begun with passion and now ending with weariness. While she listened for Abel's response, her long embroidery needle remained suspended over the toe of the slipper, where it gleamed in the lamp light.

"I don't know," replied Abel, and Blossom drew a repressed sigh of relief; "I've just ordered him to keep clear of our land, if that's what you're hintin' at."

"If you had the sperit of yo' grandpa you'd have knocked him down in the road," said Sarah angrily.

"Yes, yes, I'd have knocked him down in the road," chimed in the old man, with the eagerness of a child.

"You can't knock a man down when he asks to borrow your lantern," returned Abel, doggedly, on the defensive.

"Oh, you can't, can't you?" jeered Sarah. "All you're good for, I reckon, is to shuck corn or peel potatoes!"

For a minute Abel stared at her in silence. "I declare, mother, I don't believe you're any better than a heathen," he remarked sadly at last.

"Well, I'm not the kind of Christian you are, anyway," retorted Sarah, "I'd like to know whar you'll find anything in Scripture about not knockin' a man down because he asks you for a lantern. I thought I knew my Bible—but I reckon you are better acquainted with it—you an' yo' Mr. Mullen."

"Of course, you know your Bible. I wasn't meanin' that."

"Then if readin' yo' Bible ain't bein' a Christian, I suppose it's havin' curly hair, an' gittin' up in the pulpit an' mincin'. Who are those slippers for, Keren-happuch?"

"Mr. Mullen, grandma."

"Well, if I was goin' to embroider slippers for a minister," taunted Sarah, "I'd take care to choose one that could repeat his Scripture when he was called on."

"Ah, 'tis the age, not the man," lamented grandfather, "'tis an age of small larnin' an' weak-kneed an' mealy mouthed into the bargain. Why, they're actually afeared to handle hell-fire in the pulpit any longer, an' the texts they spout are that tame an' tasteless that 'tis like dosin' you with flaxseed tea when you're needin' tar-water. 'Twas different when I was young and in my vigour," he went on eagerly, undisturbed by the fact that nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying, "for sech was the power and logic of Parson Claymore's sermons that he could convict you of the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost even when you hadn't committed it. A mo' blameless soul never lived than my father, yet I remember one Sunday when parson fixed his eye upon him an' rolled out his stirrin' text 'Thou art the man,' he was so taken by surprise an' suddenness that he just nodded back at the pulpit 'an answered, 'Yes, parson, I am, if you'll excuse me.'"

"It's a pity ain't mo' like Parson Claymore now," remarked Sarah, who had stopped to listen to the concluding words of the anecdote. "Thar ain't vim enough in this generation of preachers to skeer a rabbit."

Her profile, with its sparse wave of hair from the forehead, was repeated in grotesque exaggeration on the wall at her back. The iron will in her lent a certain metallic hardness to her features, and her shadow resembled in outline the head on some ancient coin that had lain buried for centuries. Intrenched behind an impregnable self-esteem, she had never conceded a point, never admitted a failure, never accepted a compromise. "It ain't no wonder that a new comer thinks he can knock you down an' set on you for shootin' a few birds," she added, after a moment.

"He'll find out I ain't done with him yet," growled Archie, and rising from his seat, he took down his gun and began polishing the barrel with an old yarn stocking of Sarah's.

The long needle missed the hole at which Blossom had pointed it, and she looked up with a sullen droop to her mouth.

"I reckon Mr. Gay has just as good a right to his things as we have to ours," she said.

"Right! Who wants his right?" flared Archie, turning upon her. "You'll say next, I reckon, that he had a right to split my upper lip open if he wanted to."

"From the way grandma carries on anybody would think that was what she wanted," persisted Blossom, adhering stubbornly to the point, "she sounds as if she were mad because people ain't everlastingly fighting."

"You needn't think I don't see what you're aimin' at, Keren-happuch," rejoined Sarah, who used this name only in moments of anger, "you're tryin' to make me think a grown man can't do anything better than get up in the pulpit and mouth texts so soft that a babe couldn't cut its teeth on 'em. You've had notions in yo' head about Orlando Mullen ever since he came here, an' you ain't fooled me about 'em."

"Thar, thar, don't you begin pesterin' Blossom," interposed Abner, aroused at last from his apathy.

"Notions about Mr. Mullen!" repeated Blossom, and though there was a hot flush in her face, her tone was almost one of relief.



CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH MOLLY FLIRTS

On a November morning several weeks later, when the boughs of trees showed almost bare against the sky, Molly Merryweather walked down to Bottom's store to buy a bottle of cough syrup for Reuben, who had a cold. Over the counter Mrs. Bottom, as she was still called from an hereditary respect for the house rather than for the husband, delivered a coarse brown paper. The store, which smelt of dry-goods and ginger snaps, was a small square room jutting abruptly out of the bar, from which it derived both its warmth and its dignity.

"Even men folks have got the sperit of worms and will turn at last," she remarked in her cheerful voice, which sounded as if it issued from the feather bed she vaguely resembled.

"Let them turn—I can do without them very well," replied Molly, tossing her head.

"Ah, you're young yet, my dear, an' thar's a long road ahead of you. But wait till you've turned forty an' you'll find that the man you throwed over at twenty will come handy, if for nothin' mo' than to fill a gap in the chimney. I ain't standin' up for 'em, mind you, an' I can't remember that I ever heard anything particular to thar credit as a sex—but po' things as we allow 'em to be, thar don't seem but one way to git along without 'em, an' that is to have 'em. It's sartain sure, however, that they fill a good deal mo' of yo' thought when they ain't around than when they are. Why, look at William, now—the first time he axed me to marry him, I kept sayin' 'you're still slue-footed an' slack-kneed an' addle-headed an' I'll marry you whether or no.' Twenty years may not change a man for the better, but it does a powerful lot toward persuadin' a woman to put up with the worst!"

"Well, best or worst, I've seen enough of marriage, Mrs. Bottom, to know that I shouldn't like it."

"I ain't denyin' it might be improved on without hurtin' it—but a single woman's a terrible lonesome body, Molly."

"I'm not lonely, while I have grandfather."

"He's old an' he ain't got many years ahead of him."

"If I lose him I'll go to Applegate and trim hats for a living."

"It's a shame, Molly, with the po' miller splittin' his heart over you."

"He'll mend it. They're like that, all of them."

"But Mr. Mullen? Ain't he different now, bein' a parson?"

"No, he's just the same, and besides he'd always think he'd stooped to marry me."

"Then take Jim Halloween. With three good able-bodied lovers at yo' beck an' call, it's a downright shame to die an old maid just from pure contrariness. It's better arter all, to eat dough that don't rise than to go hungry."

A step sounded on the platform outside and a lank, good-looking countryman glanced cautiously in through the crack in the door. Observing Molly, he spat a wad of tobacco over the hitching rail by the steps, and stopped to smooth his straw-coloured hair with the palm of his hand before crossing the threshold.

"Thar's Jim Halloween now jest as we were speakin' of him," whispered Betsey Bottom, with a nudge at Molly's shoulder.

"Well, if that don't beat all," drawled the young man, in an embarrassed rapture, as he entered. "I was gettin' my horse shod over thar at Tim Mallory's, an' I thought to myself that I'd jest drop over an' say 'howdy' to Mrs. Bottom."

"Oh, I reckon you caught a glimpse of red through the door," chuckled Betsey, who was possessed of the belief that it was her Christian duty to further any match, good or bad, that came under her eye.

"I must be going, so don't hurry your visit," replied Molly, laughing. "Mrs. Hatch has been in bed for a week and I'm on my way to see Judy."

"I'll walk a bit of the road with you if you ain't any serious objection," remarked the lover, preparing to accompany her.

"Oh, no, none in the world," she replied demurely, "you may carry my cough syrup."

"It ain't for yourself, I hope?" he inquired, with a look of alarm.

"No, for grandfather. He caught cold staying in the barn with the red cow."

"Well, I'm glad 'taint for you—I don't like a weak-chested woman."

She looked up smiling as they passed the store into the sunken road which led in the direction of Solomon Hatch's cottage.

"I did see a speck of red through the crack," he confessed after a minute, as if he were unburdening his conscience of a crime.

"You mean you saw my cap or jacket—or maybe my gloves?"

"It was yo' cap, an' so I came in. I hope you have no particular objection?" His face had flushed to a violent crimson and in his throat his Adam's apple worked rapidly up and down between the high points of his collar. "I mean," he stammered presently, "that I wouldn't have gone in if I hadn't seen that bit of red through the do'. I suppose I had better tell you, that I've been thinking a great deal about you in the evening when my day's work is over."

"I'm glad I don't interfere with your farming."

"That would be a pity, wouldn't it? Do you ever think of me, I wonder, at the same time?" he inquired sentimentally.

"I can't tell because I don't know just what that time is, you see."

"Well, along after supper generally—particularly if ma has made buckwheat cakes an' I've eaten a hearty meal an' feel kind of cosy an' comfortable when I set down by the fire an' there's nothin' special to do."

"But you see I don't like buckwheat cakes, and I've always something 'special' to do at that hour."

"Ah, you don't mean it, do you—about not liking buckwheat cakes? As for the rest, bein' a woman, I reckon you would have the washin' up to attend to just at that time. I don't like a woman that sets around idle after supper—an' I'm glad you're one to be brisk an' busy about the house, though I'm sorry you ain't over partial to buckwheat. May I inquire, if you don't object to tellin' me, what is yo' favourite food?"

"It's hard to say—I have so many—bread and jam, I believe."

"I hope you don't think I'm too pressin' on the subject, but ma has always said that there wasn't any better bond for matrimony than the same taste in food. Do you think she's right?"

"I shouldn't wonder. She's had experience anyway."

"Yes, that's jest what I tell her—she's had experience an' she ought to know. Pa and she never had a word durin' the thirty years of their marriage, an' she always said she ruled him not with the tongue, but with the fryin' pan. I don't reckon there's a better cook than ma in this part of the country, do you?"

"I'm quite sure there isn't. She has given up her life to it."

"To be sure she has—every minute of it, like the woman whose price is above rubies that Mr. Mullen is so fond of preachin' about." For a moment he considered the fact as though impressed anew by its importance. "I'm glad you feel that way, because ma has always stuck out that you had the makin' of a mighty fine cook in you."

"Has she? That was nice of her, wasn't it?"

"Well, she wouldn't have said so if she hadn't thought it. It ain't her way to say pleasant things when she can help it. You must judge her by her work not by her talk, pa used to say."

"She's the kind that doesn't mind taking trouble for you, I know that about her," replied Molly, gravely.

"You're right about that, an' you're the same way, I am sure. I've watched you pretty closely with your grandfather."

"Yes, I believe I am—with grandfather."

"'Twill be the same way when you marry, I was sayin' as much to ma only yesterday. 'She'd be jest as savin' an' thrifty as you,'—I mean, of course, if the right man got you to marry him,—but 'tis all the same in the end." Again he paused, cleared his throat, and swallowed convulsively, "I've sometimes felt that I might be the right man, Miss Molly," he said.

"O Mr. Halloween!"

"Why, I thought you knew I felt so from the way you looked at me."

"But I can't help the way I look, can I?"

"Well, I've told you now, so it ain't a secret. I've thought about askin' you for more than a year—ever since you smiled at me one Sunday in church while Mr. Mullen was preachin'."

"Did I? I've quite forgotten it!"

"I suppose you have, seein' you smile so frequent. But that put the idea in my head anyway an' I've cared a terrible lot about marryin' you ever since."

"But I'm not the kind of person, at all. I'm not saving, I'm not thrifty."

"I hope you're wrong—but even if you're not, well, I want you terrible hard just the same. You see I can always keep an eye on the expenses," he hastened to add, and made a desperate clutch at her hand.

The red worsted mitten came off in his grasp, and he stood eyeing it ruefully while he waited for her answer.

"I've determined never, never to marry," she replied.

His chest heaved. "I knew you felt that way about the other's but I thought somehow I was different," he rejoined.