"I've got the church fidgets in my legs," he said. "I reckon I'll get into my everyday suit an' finish that piece of ploughin'. Are you goin' back to the mill, Abel?"

"No, I've shut down for the day," Abel replied. The funeral had turned his mind into its Sunday habit of thought and he was determined that his present state of misery should extend reverently until the evening. From some instinct, which he did not attempt to explain, it appeared more respectful to Reuben to sit idle for the rest of the day than to follow Abner's example and go out and finish his work.

The next morning he decided to write Molly a letter, and as the ordinary paper his mother kept at the house seemed unsuitable for delivery at Jordan's Journey, he walked down to the store to purchase a few sheets from Mrs. Bottoms.

"Nothing common and cheap," he said, "but the very best you have in the store—such as they use in the city."

Suspecting his purpose, she produced at once a turquoise coloured box, from which she extracted an envelope that was ornamented on the flap with a white dove holding a true lover's knot in his beak.

"This is the very thing you're lookin' for," she observed, in the tone of one who is conscious of being an authority in that sphere to which God has called her, "the latest style in Applegate."

Picking up the envelope he held it doubtfully toward the light in the doorway.

"Are you sure it isn't a little—a little loud?" he inquired wistfully.

"Loud? Dear me, to think of you callin' a dove an' a blue ribbon bow loud! Ain't that jest like a man? They can't be expected to have taste in sech matters. No, it ain't loud!" she replied with more direct condescension. "It's the latest thing from Applegate—the girls are all crazy about it—jest the little artistic trifle that catches a woman's eye."

In the end, under the sting of her rebuke, though but half convinced, he concluded the purchase and went out, bearing the box of ornamented paper under his arm. An hour later, after the letter was written, misgivings besieged him anew, and he stood holding the envelope at arm's length, while he frowned dubiously at the emblematic dove on the flap.

"It doesn't look just right to me," he said under his breath, "but Mrs. Bottom ought to know, and I reckon she does."

The letter went, and the next afternoon he followed it in person to Jordan's Journey. Gay was coming down the walk when he reached the lawn, and after a moment's hesitation they stopped to exchange a few remarks about the weather.

"There's something I want to explain to you, Revercomb," said Jonathan, wheeling back abruptly after they had parted. "Molly has become a member of our household, you see; so my relation to her is really that of a cousin. She's a staunch little soul—I've a tremendous admiration for her—but there has never been the slightest sentiment between us, you understand."

"Yes, I understand," replied Abel, and fell silent.

There was a certain magnanimity, he recognized, in Gay's effort to put things right even while he must have preferred in his heart to have them remain in the wrong. As Molly's cousin it was hardly probable that he should care to hasten her marriage to a country miller.

"Well, I wanted you to know, that was all," said Gay in a friendly tone. "You'll find Molly in the side-garden, so I wouldn't trouble to knock if I were you."

He went on, swinging with an easy stride between the hedges of box, while Abel, passing the right wing in obedience to the directions, found Molly walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops. The "side-garden" was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy. Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible. Yet the place was exquisite still. Spring had passed over it with her magical touch, and she had decorated the spot she could no longer restore. The scent of box filled the air, and little new green leaves had put out on the dusky windings of the maze.

As Abel approached, Molly was moving slowly away from him, her long black skirt, which had been made to fit Mrs. Gay, trailing over the snowdrops in the path. When she turned at the end of the walk, there was the faintest hesitancy in her manner before she came forward with a smile and an outstretched hand. In some subtle way she had changed—he felt it before she reached him—before she uttered a word. He had never seen her in a long dress until to-day; and in putting on Mrs. Gay's gown she seemed to have clothed herself in that lady's appealing and pensive manner. The black skirt, flowing between them on the grass, divided them more completely than the memory of their quarrel. He was chilled because it made her appear reserved and distant; she was embarrassed because she had not yet learned to walk in a train, and while it pleased and flattered her with a sense of dignity, it also caused her to feel awkward and unnatural in her movements, as if she were not "playing up" successfully to the part that had been assigned her. She had learned a good deal in three days, and she was still a little confused by the endeavour to understand all of her lessons. Sincere as her sorrow was for Reuben, her youth and a certain quickness of observation had kept her mindful of every change through which she had passed, of every detail which distinguished life at the "big house" from life in the overseer's cottage. She had learned, for instance, the necessity, in such circumstances, of eating as if it were an utterly indifferent matter, and yet of coming to one's meals dressed as elaborately as if one were on one's way to church. Kesiah had taught her much; but from Gay, with his abundant kindliness, his self-possession, his good clothes, she had learned incomparably more. Kesiah had shown her the external differences in "things," while Gay had opened her eyes to the external differences that might count in men. Until she knew Gay she had believed that the cultivation of one's appearance was a matter that concerned women alone. Now, when moved by some unfortunate impulse of respect for her mourning, Abel showed himself before her in his Sunday clothes, she was conscious of a shock which she would never have felt in the old days in the overseer's cottage. In his working dress, with his fine throat bared by his blue shirt, there was a splendid vitality about her lover beside which Jonathan appeared flabby and over-weighted with flesh. But dressed in imitation of the work of Gay's London tailor, the miller lost the distinction which nature had given him without acquiring the one conferred by society.

"You got my letter, Molly?" he asked—and the question was unfortunate, for it reminded her not only of the letter, but of Gay's innocent jest about the dove on the envelope. She had been ashamed at the instant, and she was ashamed now when she remembered it, for there is nothing so contagious as an active regard for the petty social values of life. In three days she had not only begun to lose her own crudeness—she had attained to a certain small criticism of the crudeness of Abel. Already the difference between the two men was irritating her, yet she was still unconscious as to the the exact particular in which this difference lay. Her vision had perceived the broad distinction of class, though it was untrained as yet to detect minute variations of manner. She knew instinctively that Gay looked a man of the world and Abel a rustic, but this did not shake in the least the knowledge that it was Abel, not Gay, whom she loved.

"Yes, I got your letter," she answered, and then she added very softly: "Abel, I've always known I was not good enough for you."

Her tone, not her words, checked his advance, and he stood staring at her in perplexity. It was this expression of dumb questioning which had so often reminded her of the look in the eyes of Reuben's hound, and as she met it now, she flinched a little from the thought of the pain she was inflicting.

"I'm not good and faithful, Abel; I'm not patient, I'm not thrifty, I'm not anything your wife ought to be."

"You're all I'm wanting, anyway, Molly," he replied quietly, but without moving toward her.

"I feel—I am quite sure we could not be happy together," she went on, hurriedly, as if in fear that he might interrupt her before she had finished.

"Do you mean that you want to be free?" he asked after a minute.

"I don't know, but I don't want to marry anybody. All the feeling I had went out of me when grandfather died—I've been benumbed ever since—and I don't want to feel ever again, that's the worst of it."

"Is this because of the quarrel?"

"Oh, know—you know, I was always like this. I'm a thing of freedom—I can't be caged, and so we'd go on quarrelling and kissing, kissing and quarrelling, until I went out of my mind. You'd want to make me over and I'd want to make you over, like two foolish children fighting at play."

It was true what she had said, and he realized it, even though he protested against it. She was a thing of freedom as much as one of the swallows that flashed by in the sunlight.

"And you don't want to marry me? You want to be free—to be rich?"

"It isn't the money—but I don't want to marry."

"Have you ever loved me, I wonder?" he asked a little bitterly.

For an instant she hesitated, trying in some fierce self-reproach to be honest. "I thought so once, and I suppose I'll think so again," she answered. "The truth is I've loved you some days, and some days I haven't. I've never believed much in it, you know—I wasn't that kind of woman. It always meant so much less to me than to others."

It was true again, he admitted it. She had never been—and he had always known it—"that kind of woman." She had safely mocked at sex only because she had never felt its significance. From the depths of his misery, he told himself, while he faced her, that she would be perfect if she were only a little different—if she were only "that kind of woman." She possessed a thousand virtues, he was aware; she was generous, honourable according to her lights, loyal, brave, charitable, and unselfish. But it is the woman of a single virtue, not a thousand, that a man exalts.

"Yes, I suppose it always meant less to you than to others," he repeated dully.

"It wasn't my fault—why do you blame me?" she responded quickly. "Men hold a woman to blame when she doesn't love, however ill they may use her as soon as she does it. Oh, I know you're not that sort—you needn't explain it. You are different, and this is why I am half loving you even now. Last night when I awoke and heard a mockingbird in the cedars, I told myself that I could never be happy away from you. But when the light came, I wanted to see the world, and I forgot you. I'm only twenty-one. I'm too young to tie myself down forever."

"My mother married when she was sixteen," he replied, partly because he could think of nothing else to say at the moment, partly because he honestly entertained the masculine conviction that the precedent in some way constituted an argument.

"And a sensible marriage it was!" retorted Molly with scorn. "She's had a hard enough lot and you know it." In her earnestness she had almost assumed the position of Sarah's champion.

"Yes, I reckon it is," he returned, wounded to the quick. "I've no right to ask you to exchange what they offer you for a life like my mother's."

Fulness of emotion lent dignity to his words, but if he had shown indifference instead of tenderness, it would probably have served him better. She was so sure of Abel—so ready to accept as a matter of course the fact that she could rely on him.

"So you want it to be all over between us?" he asked.

"I don't want to be tied—I don't think I ought to be." Her tone was firm, but she plucked nervously at a bit of crape on the sleeve of Mrs. Gay's gown.

"Perhaps you're right," he replied quietly. He had spoken in a stiff and constrained manner, with little show of his suffering, yet all the while he felt that a band of iron was fastened across his brain, and the physical effect of this pressure was almost unendurable. He wanted to ease his swollen heart by some passionate outburst, but an obstinate instinct, which was beyond his control, prevented his making a ridiculous display of his emotion. The desire to curse aloud, to hurl defiant things at a personal deity, was battling within him, but instead of yielding to it he merely repeated:

"I reckon you're right—it wouldn't be fair to you in the end."

"I hope you haven't any hard feeling toward me," she said presently, sweetly commonplace.

"Oh no, I haven't any hard feeling. Good-bye, Molly."

"Good-bye, Abel."

Turning away from her, he walked rapidly back along the short grassy path over the snowdrops. As she watched him, a lump rose in her throat, and she asked herself what would happen if she were to call after him, and when he looked round, run straight into his arms? She wanted to run into his arms, but her knowledge of herself told her that once there she would not want to stay. The sense of bondage would follow—on his part the man's effort to dominate; on hers the woman's struggle for the integrity of personality. As long as he did not possess her she knew that emotion would remain paramount over judgment—that the longing to win her would triumph over the desire to improve what he had won. But once surrendered, the very strength and singleness of his love would bring her to cage. The swallow flights and the freedom of the sky would be over, and she would either beat her wings hopelessly against the bars, or learn to eat from his hand, to sing presently at his whistle. Had passion urged her, this hesitancy would have been impossible. Then she would either have seen none of these things, or, having seen them, she would have dared greatly. She was too cool, too clear-sighted, perhaps, for a heroine of romance. The single virtue that has fed vampire-like on the blood of the others, the abject attitude of the heart, the moral chicanery of sex—she would have none of these things.

"I am very fond of him, but I want to live—to live," she said, raising her arms with a free movement to the sky, while she looked after his figure. "Poor Abel," she added after a moment, "he will never get over it."

Then, while the sigh of compassion was still on her lips, she was arrested by a scene which occurred in the sunny meadow. From the brook a woman's form had risen like a startled rabbit at Abel's approach, wavering against the background of willows, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. The next instant, as though in obedience to some mental change, it came quickly forward and faced the miller with an upward movement of the hands to shelter a weeping face.

"I believe—I really believe it is Judy Hatch," said Molly to herself, and there was a faint displeasure in her voice. "I wonder what she is doing in the willows?"

Judy Hatch it was, and at sight of Abel she had sprung up in terror from the edge of the brook, poised for flight like a wild thing before the gun of the hunter. He saw that her eyes were red and swollen from weeping, her face puckered and distorted. The pain in his own heart was so acute that for a moment he felt a sensation of relief in finding that he was not alone in his agony—that the universal portion of suffering had not been allotted entirely to himself, as he had imagined. Had she smiled, he would have brushed past her in silence, but because of her agitated and despairing look, he called her name, and when she turned toward him in bewilderment, held out his hand. It was a small accident that brought them together—nothing more than the fact that she had stooped to bathe her eyes in the stream before going on to the turnpike.

"Don't go, Judy; you're in trouble, I see, and so am I," he said with bitterness.

"Oh, Mr. Revercomb!" she blurted out. "I didn't want anybody to catch me in such a pass!"

"I'm not anybody, Judy; I'm a poor devil that was born without sense enough to plough his furrow straight."

She was a plain woman, but a pretty one would have sent him off in a panic over the meadow. He had had his lesson from a pretty woman, and the immediate effect of it was to foster the delusion that there was a mysterious affinity between ugliness and virtue.

"Tell me what it is, Judy. Can I help you?" he said kindly.

"It's nothin'. I am always in trouble," she answered, sobbing outright behind her sunbonnet. "Between pa and my stepmother, there isn't a spot on earth I can rest in."

She looked at him and he knew immediately, from her look, that neither Solomon Hatch nor his second wife was responsible for Judy's unhappiness. For a mocking instant it occurred to him that she might have cherished a secret and perfectly hopeless passion for himself. That she might be cherishing this passion for another, he did not consider at the moment—though the truth was that her divinity inhabited not a mill, but a church, and was, therefore, she felt, trebly unapproachable. But her worship was increased by this very hopelessness, this elevation. It pleased her that the object of her adoration should bend always above her—that in her dreams he should preach a perpetual sermon and wear an imperishable surplice.

"Well, I'm sorry for you," said Abel; "I'm sorry for you." And indeed he was. "You're a good, pious, virtuous girl—just the sort of a girl a man would want for his wife."

"I try to be good and I don't see why I should be so—so unhappy," sobbed Judy. "There ain't a better hand for raisin' chickens and flowers and young lambs in the county."

Again she looked up at him through her tears, and the fool that lies at the bottom of all generous hearts rose instantly to her bait. As he had once been the sport of his desire, so he was to become now the sport of his pity.

"Any man ought to be proud to have you for his wife, Judy," he said.

"Ought they, Abel?" she replied passionately, with the vision of the Reverend Orlando rising in serene detachment before her.

For a moment he gazed down at her without speaking. It was pleasant to feel pity; it was more than pleasant to receive gratitude in return. On the raw wound in his heart something that was almost like a cooling balm had been poured.

"God knows I'm sorry for you, Judy," he repeated; "we're both in the same boat, so I ought to be. Come to me if I can ever help you, and you'll find you may count on my word."

"I—I'll remember, Abel," she answered tearfully, but her thoughts were of a certain pair of purple velvet slippers, begun in rivalry of Blossom's black ones, which she was embroidering in pansies.

As he turned away from her into the crowd of silver willows beside the brook, she stood looking after him with the abstracted gaze of one who dwells not in the world of objects, but in the exalted realm of visions.



CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON

As Abel crossed the poplar log he said to himself, "I shall not think of Her again"; when he reached the end of the willows he said, "I must not think of Her again"; and at the beginning of the kitchen garden, he changed this to, "I will not think of Her again."

The scent of hyacinths, which floated from a row blooming on either side of the white paling gate, whipped his senses into revolt, and he quickened his steps in a vain effort to escape from the tormenting fragrance. Yet even while he fled from his pain he knew in his heart that he did not desire the strength to turn and renounce it—that to banish the image of Molly from his thoughts was to drive the bloom from the meadow, the perfume from the air, the sunlight from the orchard. Spring became as desolate as winter when it was robbed of the thought of her.

By the house a late pear-tree was in blossom, and the sunshine, falling obliquely across it, awoke a white fire in its branches, as if piles of new fallen snow had warmed suddenly to a reflected flame. Beneath it Sarah Revercomb was sowing portulaca seeds in a rockery she had made over a decaying stump. Her back was strained with bending, but not once had she stopped to gaze at the glorified pear-tree overhead. All her life she had distinguished carefully between the aristocracy and the common herd of blossoms, and not all the magic gilding of the spring sunshine could delude her into regarding the useful product of a fruit-tree as a flower.

"I don't see why you want to go wearin' yo' Sunday clothes every day, Abel," she observed as he was about to pass her.

"Why shouldn't I?" he retorted with the defiance of despair.

Something in his voice caused the woman who had borne him to raise herself from her stooping posture, and stare at him with an amazed and incredulous expression, as if she were asking herself when and where she could have given him birth. In her mental vision, which saw only one thing at a time, but saw that thing with great distinctness, the idea of love slowly presented itself as the cause of such a reversal of the natural order as a Sunday suit on week days. Her conceptions of life were derived so closely from facts, or from a logic as inexorable as facts, that she was conscious of a baffled and exasperated sensation when she was confronted by anything intangible which would not, as she put it in her own mind, "get out of her way." It was natural enough, she knew, that a material object or condition should possess the power to block one's progress or even to change the normal current of one's existence. Such things had happened a dozen times at least in her limited experience. But when a mere emotion assumed the importance and the reality of a solid body, she was seized by the indignant astonishment with which a mathematician might regard the differential calculus if it ceased suddenly to behave as he expected it to do. She had always controlled her own feeling with severity, and it was beyond the power of her imagination to conceive a possible excuse—unless it was a disordered liver—for another person's inability to do the same. Besides, as she had often asked herself, what was the use of not controlling your feelings when you came to think about it?

"Thar ain't a bit of use in yo' goin' on this way over that girl, Abel," she said presently, as an annotation to his last remark, "you'd better jest start along about yo' work, an' put her right straight out of yo' mind. I al'ays knew thar warn't a particle of sense in it."

There was sound reason in her advice, and he did not attempt to dispute it. The unfortunate part was, however, that in the very soundness of her reason lay its point of offence. Philosophy was dealing again in her high handed fashion with emotion, and emotion, in its turn, was treating philosophy with an absence of that respectful consideration to which she was entitled. Abel knew quite as well as Sarah that there wasn't "a particle of sense" in his thinking of Molly; but the possession of this knowledge did not interfere in the least with either the intensity or the persistence of his thought of her. His mind seemed to have as much control over the passion that raged in his heart as an admonishing apostle of peace has over a mob that is headed toward destruction. At the moment he felt that the last straw—the one burden more that he could not bear—was to be told to follow what he admitted to be the only clear and rational course. Turning away from her without a reply, he rushed through the open gate and across the road and the poplar log into the friendly shelter of his mill.

"What he needs is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her rockery.

In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would beat in vain against its impregnable barrier. But the books, like Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of philosophy. He could get no assistance from them, because they only told him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and this did not help him. They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of unanimity, that human nature would be better and happier if it were not human nature, but something else. Some of the writers believed that this result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that were already made. All admitted that the world was very badly off and that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it—but the trouble was that each writer's remedy was different from every other writer's, and yet each writer's was the imperative, the essential one. There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human nature would be better and happier if it were different. But poor human nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on, just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.

"There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round greenish balls of flowers. On the hot agony in his heart the languorous Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his immediate suffering.

For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion of politics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.

A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the following Friday. Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself, and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal code, he still hoped on with the divine far-sighted hope of the visionary—hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he would probably have continued to do so had Fate been so unjust as to consign him to an Inferno. He was one of those in whom goodness is a natural instinct, and whose existence, even in a more or less inglorious obscurity, leavens the entire lump of humanity. Mr. Mullen, who regarded him with the active suspicion with which he viewed all living examples of Christian charity, spoke of him condescendingly as a "man of impracticable ideas"—a phrase which introduced his index prohibitory of opinions. But the old clergyman, having attained a serviceable sense of humour, as well as a heavenly fortitude, went on quietly doing good after the fashion in which he was made. In his impracticable way he had solved the problem of life by an indiscriminate application of the Golden Rule. This solution had appeared to him so simple and yet so complete, that he had spent fifty years, with but moderate success, in persuading others to adopt it. At the end he was not what Mr. Mullen would have called a "shining light," in the Church, yet his bread cast upon the waters had returned to him in quantities, which, though small and moist, were sufficient, with stringent economy, to keep body and soul together. One of these quantities he discerned now in the eager young countryman, whose face accompanied him through a trying day, and helped to brighten his self-sacrificing labours.

To Abel, driving home some hours later in his gig, the old clergyman was present less as a mental image, than as a vague yet impelling influence for good. The impression was still in his thoughts, when he overtook Judy Hatch a mile or two before reaching the crossroads, and stopped to ask her to drive with him as far as her cottage. At sight of her wan and haggard face, he felt again that impulse of pity, which seemed while it lasted to appease the violence of his suffering.

"I haven't seen you to speak to for a long time," he observed, as she mounted over the wheel to her place at his side.

"Not since that day by the brook," she answered, and flinched as if a raw wound had been touched.

Though she did not look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young summer, with the pulsing of life of the June forest and the scent of wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air. Her face was lifted to the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song of a thrush rippled like running water, and which gave her, if he had only known it, a likeness to one of the minor saints in a primitive Italian painting. So little, however, did her passion use her body as its medium that, after glancing casually at her parted lips, he decided that she was probably counting the eggs she had set to hatch in her hen-house, and hesitated to interrupt the absorbing business of her calculations. Mentally, he regarded her with the ungrudging respect which a man of any sort instinctively yields to a woman who obviously disdains to ensnare his judgment in the mesh of his senses. The palpitations of her spirit were communicated to him in so elusive a process, that, even while he felt the stir of his pulses, he was not aware that it was due in any measure to the woman at his side. If she had been pretty—if she had been even attractively plain—it would hardly have occurred to him that her intense and breathless expression was associated with the hatching of chickens; but, like other philosophers of whom he had never heard, it was impossible for him to distinguish the qualities of the thing-in-itself from the qualities of the phenomenon beneath his eyes. Had he winnowed his superficial impressions the underlying thought would probably have been: "No woman with a bosom as flat as that can have any nonsense about her." From the first moment of their meeting he had never doubted that it was this lack of "nonsense" which had attracted him. He liked her evident indifference to his opinion of her, and he liked, too, her listless silence, when she sat, with clasped hands, gazing straight ahead through the shadowy colonnade of the woods. Not once had her troubled look wandered from the moist dead leaves on the ground, to the misty edges of the forest, where small wild flowers thronged in a pale procession of pipsissewa, ladies' tresses, and Enchanter's nightshade.

"Did you know that the Gays are in Europe?" asked Judy turning her eyes on his face for the first time.

His heart gave a throb and was quiet.

"No, I hadn't heard it," he replied in an arid voice.

"They say it's more than likely Molly will marry Mr. Jonathan. He's waitin' on her."

Reaching for the whip, Abel touched the mare lightly on her glossy flank. After that single pang his suffering had left him—for six weeks of sleepless nights and tormented days had exhausted his endurance and reduced him to a condition of emotional lassitude. In his brief reaction from spiritual revolt into a state of apathetic submission, he approached his mother's permanent austerity of mind as closely as he was ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility of a fresh awakening of feeling filled him with aversion. At the moment he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; and looking ahead, he saw his future stretching before him as firm and flat as the turnpike which he was approaching. Delight and despair were equally distasteful to him. He shrank as instinctively from the thought of love as a man shrinks from re-opening an old wound which is still sensitive to the touch, though it has ceased to ache. And so prone is human nature to affirm its inherent belief in the eternity of the present, that he was assured, not only that this was the most desirable point of view he had ever reached, but that it was entirely out of the question that he should ever travel beyond it to another. Forgetting the many times when he had revolted from advice merely because it was "sensible," he began calmly to arrange his life in accordance with that law of practical expediency against which a month ago he had so hotly rebelled.

As they drove out of the woods, and turned into the sunken road beyond the ordinary which led in the direction of Solomon Hatch's farm, he withdrew his gaze from the head of his mare and looked attentively at his companion.

"I hope you are having an easier time, Judy," he said.

Her eyes brimmed. "You are the only person who cares about that, Abel."

"Why shouldn't I care? You are the best and the cleverest girl I know," he returned.

Her gratitude fanned his sympathy, which was beginning to smoulder, and he felt again the pleasant sense of being in the position of benefactor rather than of the benefited. His eyes rested without shrinking on her sallow face, with the faint bluish tinge to the eyelids, and on her scant drab coloured hair, which was combed smoothly back from her forehead—and while he looked his pity clothed itself in the softer and gentler aspect of reason. "She ought to be happy," he thought. "It's a shame they should lead her such a life! It's a shame some good man doesn't fall in love with her and marry her. She's really not so plain, after all. I've seen many women who were worse looking than she is." Unknown to him, an illusion was gradually shedding colour and warmth on his vision of her. Mentally, he had endowed her with all the sober and saner virtues to which his present mood was committed—though he had, in reality, no better reason for so doing than the fact that she evidently esteemed him and that she was deserving of pity. The discordant forces of passion no longer disturbed the calm and orderly processes of his mind, and he told himself that he saw clearly, because he saw stark images of facts, stripped not only of the glamour of light and shade, but even of the body of flesh and blood. Life spread before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for him to conceive of it in motion.

And all the while, in that silence, which seemed so harmless while it was, in reality, so dangerous, the repressed yet violent force in Judy wrought on his mood in which bare sense and bare thought were unprotected by any covering of the love which had clothed them as far back as he could remember. That breathless, palpitating appeal for happiness—an appeal which is as separate from beauty as the body of flesh is separate from the garment it wears—was drawing him slowly yet inevitably toward the woman at his side. Her silence—charged as it was with the intoxicating spirit of June—had served the purpose of life as neither words nor gestures could have done. It had reconciled him to her presence in the very moment that made him conscious of the strength of his pity.

Presently, as they drove through the burned out clearing, she spoke again.

"I wonder why you are always so good to me, Abel?"

He liked the honest sound of the words, and he did not know that before uttering them she had debated in her heart whether it was worth while to marry Abel since she could not marry Mr. Mullen. Marriage, having few illusions for her, possessed, perhaps for that reason, the greater practical value. She was unhappy with her stepmother in a negative way, but so impervious had she become to casual annoyances, that she hardly weighed the disadvantages of her home against the probable relinquishment of Mrs. Mullen's washing day after her marriage to Abel. Her soul was crushed like a trapped creature in the iron grip of a hopeless passion, and her insensibility to the lesser troubles of life was but the insensibility of such a creature to the stings of the insects swarming around its head. The outcome of her drive with Abel aroused only a dull curiosity in her mind. Some years ago, in the days before Mr. Mullen, she would probably have fallen a helpless victim to the miller had his eyes wandered for an instant in her direction. But those days and that probability were now over forever.

Unfortunately, however, it is not given to a man to look into the soul of a woman except through the inscrutable veil of his own personality. Had Abel pierced that purple calico dress and witnessed the pathetic struggle in Judy's bosom, his next words would hardly have been uttered.

"I wish I could do something to make you happier, Judy."

She looked at him with mysterious, brooding eyes, and he was conscious again of the attraction, as subtile and as penetrating as a perfume, which she exhaled in the stillness, and which vanished as soon as she broke the quivering intensity of the silence. That this attraction was merely the unconscious vibration of her passion for another man, which shed its essence in solitude as naturally as a flower sheds its scent, did not occur to him. Without his newly awakened pity it could not have moved him. With it he felt that he was powerless to resist its appeal.

"Why shouldn't I be good to you, Judy?" he repeated.

Tears overflowed her eyes at his words. Looking at her, he saw her not as she was, but as he desired that she should be; and this desire, he knew, sprang from his loneliness and from his need of giving sympathy to some one outside of himself. The illusion that surrounded her bore no resemblance to the illusion of love—yet it was akin to it in the swiftness and the completeness with which it was born. If any one had told him an hour ago that he was on the verge of marriage to Judy, he would have scoffed at the idea—he who was the heartbroken lover of Molly! Yet this sudden protecting pity was so strong that he found himself playing with the thought of marriage, as one plays in lofty moments with the idea of a not altogether unpleasant self-abnegation. He did not love Judy, but he was conscious of an overwhelming desire to make Judy happy—and like all desires which are conceived in a fog of uncertainty, its ultimate form depended less upon himself than it did upon the outward pressure of circumstances.

"I sometimes think it's more than anybody can stand to go on living as I do," said Judy, breaking the silence, "to slave an' slave an' never to get so much as a word of thanks for it."

For a moment he said nothing. Then turning he looked hard into her humid eyes, and what he saw there made him bend over and take her hand.

"Do you think I could make you happier, Judy?" he asked.



BOOK SECOND

THE CROSS-ROADS



CHAPTER I

IN WHICH YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED

Some six months after Abel's parting from Molly, he might have been seen crossing the lawn at Jordan's Journey on a windy November morning, and even to a superficial observer it would have been evident that certain subtle modifications had been at work in his soul. Disappointed love had achieved this result with a thoroughness which victorious love could not have surpassed. Because he had lost Molly, he had resolved, in his returning sanity, that he would make of himself the man who might have won Molly had she known him in his completeness. And in the act of resolving, his character had begun to ripen into the mellowness of maturity.

The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows in the hooded roof. Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as a sea. The birds, as they skimmed over this billowy expanse, appeared blown, despite their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of the west. On the lawn at Jordan's Journey the fallen leaves were dancing madly like a carnival in rough carousal. Watching them it was easy to imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death—the end to which they had moved from the young green of the bud through the opulent abundance of the summer. The air was alive with their sighing. They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then, whipped by a strong gust, fled in purple and wine-coloured multitudes to the shelter of the box hedges, or, rising in flight above the naked boughs, beat against the closed shutters before they came to rest against the square brick chimneys on the roof.

Beneath the trees a solitary old negro was spreading manure over the grass, hauling it in a wheelbarrow from a pile somewhere in the barnyard. Back and forth he passed, scattering the fine manure from his spade until the wheelbarrow was empty, when he replenished it in the barnyard and returned to his sprinkling. All the while he smoked steadily a long corncob pipe, and to watch him at his task, was to receive an impression that the hauling of manure was sufficient to fill one's life with dignity and contentment. The work appeared no longer a menial employment but a sober and serious share of the great problem of production.

"That's the way I intend to go about the work of my mill," thought Abel, as he watched him. "When you do it like that it really makes very little difference what you are doing. It all comes to good." A minute before his thought had been on the new roller mill he had recently bought and was now working in his primitive little building, which he had slightly remodelled. The next thing to go, he supposed, would be the old wooden wheel, with its brilliant enamel of moss, and within five years he hoped to complete the reconstruction of his machinery on lines that were scientific rather than picturesque. His water power was good, and by the time he could afford an entire modern equipment, he would probably have all the grain at his door that he was ready to handle. Then he began to wonder, as he had often done of late, if the work of the farm and the mill might be left safely to Abner and Archie when he went up to Richmond to the General Assembly, in the event of his future election? Already he had achieved a modest local fame as a speaker—for his voice expressed the gradual political awakening of his class. Though he was in advance of his age, it was evident, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was moving in the direction whither lagging progress was bound. In the last eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists, and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in milk. That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories, but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a strong religious conviction, by a belief in the determining power of a practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of his century—the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a social regeneration that would follow an enlightened and instructed proletariat. Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church. Since no man thinketh to himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the invertebrate to the vertebrate. His mind being open, ideas had entered, and having entered, they proceeded immediately to take active possession. He was serving a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as ardently as a lover serves his mistress.

As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but enskied. Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the pain. Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from his mind. Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her "a light woman," he had come perilously near the feeling that she had grazed the skirts of impropriety with a recklessness which no sober minded son of Sarah Revercomb could countenance for a minute. His very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities. Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds. What Abel had never divined was that Molly, like himself, might approach the angelic in one mood and fall short of the merely human in another—that she, also, was capable of moments of sublimation and of hours of recusancy. There were the ashes of a poet in her soul as in his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the crucible for purifying flames.

But it was six months ago that he had condemned her, and since then the subtle modifications had worked in his habit of thought. As the soreness passed from his heart, he had nursed the scar much as a crusader might have cherished a wound out of the Holy Wars. From the actual conditions of life in which he had loved her, he now beheld her caught up into the zone of ideal and impossible beauty. Through the outer covering of her flesh he could see her soul shine, as the stars shone through the web of purple twilight on the marshes. From his earlier craving for possession, his love had grown, through frustration and disappointment, into a simpler passion for service.

"Well, one has to find out things," he said to himself on this November morning, while he watched the old negro at his work. Some red leaves whirled into his face, and the wind, lifting the dark hair from his forehead, showed three heavy furrows between his knitted brows. He appeared a little older, a little braver, a little wiser, yet there was about him still the look of superb physical vitality which had been the result of a youth spent in the open fields.

"Howdy, Uncle Boaz," he said to the old negro, who approached with his wheelbarrow. "Your folks have all gone away for good haven't they?"

"Hit looks dat ar way, marster, hit sutney do look dat ar way."

"Well, you keep good grass here all the same."

"Dar ain' but one way ter do hit, suh, en dat's ter dung hit," replied Uncle Boaz, and he remarked a minute afterwards, as he put down the lowered handles of the wheel barrow, and stood prodding the ashes in his pipe, "I'se gwinter vote fur you, Marse Abel, I sholy is—-"

"Thank you, Uncle Boaz!"

"En I'se got a sack er co'n I'd be moughty bleeged ter git ground up fur hominy meal—-"

With a laugh Abel passed on through the side-garden, and entered the leafless shrubbery that bordered the Haunt's Walk. The old negro had disturbed his dream, which had been of Molly in her red stockings, with the red ribbon binding her curls. Then he thought of Spot, the aged hound—"That dog must have lived to be seventeen years old," he said aloud in the effort to smother the sharp pang at his heart, "I remember how fond old Reuben was of him even as a puppy. He would never let him run hares with anybody except himself." It was seventeen years ago that Spot was a puppy and he a boy—and now the one was dust with old Reuben, and the other had settled down so effectually that he was going to marry Judy in a fortnight. At least Judy was a good woman—nobody had ever said a word against her—and she would make him a good wife. That, after all, was what a farmer must think of—a good, saving wife, without any foolishness about her, who would be thrifty and lend a hand at his work when he needed it. All the rest was nonsense when once a man married. Dreams were all very well in their way, but realities and not dreams, after all, were things he must live with. Looking ahead he saw his future stretching smooth and firm, like the flat white turnpike that dragged its solid length into the distance. On that road there was no place for the absurdity of red stockings! And so, in the absence of all elation, only the grim sense of duty in the doing soothed him as he made his way to Solomon Hatch's cottage.

On the back porch he found Judy deftly taking butter out of the churn, and watched her while she worked the soft lumps with a wooden paddle in a large yellow bowl. Though he would have been the last to suspect it—for passion like temptation appeared to him to beset the beautiful alone—Judy, in her homely way, was also a crucible, and the little earthern pot of her body was near to bursting at the moment from the violence of the flames within. She had just seen a black coated figure in a red gig spin by on the road, and for one blissful minute, she had permitted herself a flight of fancy, in which she was the bride, not of Abel Revercomb, but of Orlando Mullen. To sit in that red wheeled gig, touching the sleeve of his black coat! To stitch the frayed seams in is silk waistcoat! To iron his surplices as only she could iron when the divine fury seized her! To visit his poor and afflicted! To lift her swooning gaze every Sunday, with a sense of possession, to that pulpit! For a minute only the rapture lasted, and all the time, she went on placidly making butter in the large yellow bowl. She was in the mood to commit sublime follies and magnificent indiscretions. For the sake of a drive in that red wheeled gig she would have foresworn Abel at the altar. For the ecstasy of ironing those surplices she would have remained a spinster forever.

"That's nice butter, Judy," remarked her lover, and believed that he had paid her a tribute peculiarly suited to the complexion of her soul.

His gaze followed the drab sweep of her hair, which was combed straight back from her forehead. Her eyes were looking heavenward while she worked, yet they caught no beam, no colour from her celestial visions. Small hectic blotches burned in the centre of her cheeks, and her thin lips were pressed tightly together as though she bit back a cry. Sometimes she would remain dumb for an hour in his presence, while her thoughts soared like birds in the blue region of dreams. She indulged her imagination in grotesque but intoxicating reveries, in which she passed nobly and with honour through a series of thrillingly romantic adventures; and, in fact, only ten minutes before Abel's arrival, she had beheld herself and the young clergyman undergoing a rapturous, if slightly unreal, martyrdom, as missionaries to the Chinese.

Her dreams dropped suddenly, with broken wings, in their flight, for her stepmother, a small sickly woman, with a twisted smile, looked out through the dining-room window, and remarked facetiously:

"You all don't look much like a co'tin couple to my eyes."

"I've been admiring her butter," replied Abel, who was always unduly regardful of his English in the presence of Mrs. Hatch.

"She's a good hand at butter when she chooses to be, but she has her ups and downs like the rest of us."

"All of us have them, I suppose," he rejoined, and Mrs. Hatch drew in her head.

"I never imagined that you got put out, Judy," he said, forgetting the tears that had led him to his sacrifice; "you always seem so quiet and sober."

She glanced up, for there was a sound of wheels on the road, and Mr. Mullen drove by again, sitting very erect, and uncovering, with a graceful bend, to some one who was visible at the front. Her face flushed suddenly to the colour of the brickdust, and she felt that the confusion in her soul must fill the universe with noise. Quiet and sober, indeed, if he could only have heard it!

But Abel was busy with his own problems, while his gaze followed Mr. Mullen's vanishing back, which had, even from a distance, a look of slight yet earnest endeavour. He still liked the young rector for his sincerity and his uprightness, but he had found, on the whole, that he could approach his God more comfortably when the straight and narrow shadow of the clergyman did not come between.

"Aren't you going to pat it any more?" he asked presently, returning to his consideration of the butter.

Picking up a square linen cloth, Judy dipped it into a basin of brine, and, after wringing it out, carefully folded it over the yellow bowl.

"All the buttermilk is out of it," she answered, and thought of the unfinished pair of purple slippers laid away in tissue paper upstairs in her bureau drawer. As a married woman could she, with virtue, continue to embroider slippers in pansies for her rector? These had been laid aside on the day of her engagement to Abel, but she yearned now to riot in purple shades with her needle. While she listened with a detached mind to Abel's practical plans for the future, her only interest in the details lay in the fact that they would, in a measure, insure the possibility of a yearly offering of slippers. And while they looked into each other's eyes, neither suspected for a moment the existence of a secret chamber in the other's soul. All appeared plain and simple on the surface, and Judy, as well as Abel, was honestly of the opinion that she understood perfectly the situation and that the passionate refusal of her heart was the only element that threatened the conventional security of appearances.

She was in the morbid condition of mind when the capacity for feeling seems concentrated on a single centre of pain. Her soul revolved in a circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness which surrounds any moment of vivid experience. The velvet slippers, which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery of which Abel was speaking showed to her merely as sordid and mechanical details of existence.

Looking at her suddenly, he realized that she had heard nothing of what he was saying. If he had looked deeper still he would have seen the tragedy of her lovely little soul spinning the web of its perishing illusion. Of all the martyrdoms allotted to love's victims, she was enduring the bitterest, which is the martyrdom of frustration. Yet because she appeared dull and undesirable on the surface, he had declined, with the rest of Old Church, to regard her emotions any less casually than he regarded her complexion.

"Well, I ought to be a proud man to have you, Judy," he remarked, and rose to his feet.

"I hope neither of us will ever regret it," she returned.

"Not if I can help it," he said, and, putting his arm around her, he drew her to him and kissed her lips. It was the second time he had kissed her, and on the first occasion she had burst into hysterical weeping. He did not know that it was the only caress she had ever received, and that she had wept because it had fallen so far short of what her imagination had deluded her into expecting. Now, though she had herself well in hand and gave no visible sign of her disappointment, there was a fierce, though unspoken, protest in her heart. "To think that after all the nights I've lain awake an' wondered what 'twas like, it should turn out to be so terrible flat," she said bitterly to herself.

"It's just a fortnight off now, Judy," he remarked gently, if not tenderly.

"I hope your mother will get on with me, Abel."

"She sets great store by you now. You're pious, and she likes that even though you do go to the Episcopal church. I heard her say yesterday that it was a rare thing to see a girl find as much comfort in her religion as you do."

"You'll never want to come between me and my church work, will you, Abel? I do most of the Foreign Mission work, you know, an' I teach in Sunday school and I visit the sick every Friday."

"Come between? Why, it makes me proud of you! When I asked Mr. Mullen about marrying us, he said: 'She's been as good as a right hand to me ever since I came here, Revercomb.'"

"Tell me over again. What were his words exactly?"

"'She's been as good as a right hand to me, Revercomb,' that was what he said, and he added, 'She's the salt of the earth, that's the only way to describe her.' And now, goodbye, Judy, I must be going back to work."

Without glancing round, he went at his rapid stride down the narrow walk to the whitewashed gate, which hung loose on broken hinges. In the road he came face to face with Jonathan Gay, who was riding leisurely in the direction of Jordan's Journey.

"How are you, Revercomb? All well?"

"Yes, all well, thank you." Turning in his tracks, he gazed thoughtfully after the rider for a moment.

"I wonder why he came out of his way instead of keeping to the turnpike?" he thought, and a minute later, "that's the third time he's come back since the family left Jordan's Journey."



CHAPTER II

THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH

At the gate before the Revercombs' house Blossom was standing in a dress of vivid blue.

"Are you going to a party?" Abel inquired as he reached her, and she answered impatiently:

"I promised to wear this dress over to Judy's, so that she could see how it is trimmed."

"Does she want a blue one?" he asked. It seemed to him little short of ludicrous that Judy should buy a new dress because she was going to be married to him; but in the presence of a custom so firmly entrenched behind the traditions of respectability, he knew that protest would be useless. Judy would check out her unromantic person in wedding finery because finery was customary on such occasions.

"Of course we couldn't dress just alike, Abel," replied Blossom. His question had seemed foolish to her and her usual soft solemnity was ruffled by a passing irritation. "Judy's frock will be green, but she wants bretelles like these on it."

"Bretelles?" he repeated as incredulously as if he had possessed any but the vaguest idea of the article the word described. "Why didn't she wait until she was married, and then I'd have bought them for her," he added.

"Of course she wants her wedding clothes—all girls do," said Blossom, invoking tradition. "Are you coming in now. We're having dinner a little earlier."

She turned and moved slowly up the walk, while he followed, caressing the head of Moses, his spotted hound. From the kitchen he could hear Sarah Revercomb scolding the small negro, Mary Jo, whom she was training to wait on the table. On one side of the hearth grandmother sat very alert, waiting for her bowl of soup, into which Mary Jo was crumbling soft bread, while across from her grandfather chuckled to himself over a recollection which he did not divulge.

At Abel's entrance, the old man stopped chuckling and inquired in an interested tone,

"Did you buy that ar steer, Abel?"

"Not yet, I'm to think it over and let Jim Bumpass know."

"Thar never was sech a man for steers," remarked grandmother, contemptuously. "Here he's still axin' about steers when he can't hist himself out of his cheer. If I were you, Abel, I'd tell him he'd better be steddyin' about everlastin' damnation instead of steers. Steers ain't goin' to haul him out of hell fire if he once gits down into it."

"Well, you can tell her, Abel," retorted grandfather, "that it's time enough to holler 'hell-fire!' when you begin to burn."

Mary Jo prevented a rejoinder by appearing with a napkin, which she tied under his wife's chin, and a little later the old woman could be heard drinking greedily her bowl of soup. She lived for food, yet, like most passions which have become exaggerated by concentration out of all proportion to the fact upon which they depend, the moment of fulfilment seemed always brief and unsatisfactory after the intensity of anticipation. To-day the trouble was there were no carrots in the soup, and this omission reduced her to tears because it had blighted the hopes of her entire morning.

"An' I'd been hankerin' arter them carrots ever since breakfast," she whimpered.

"Don't cry, ma, I'll mash you up some nice ones for supper. That'll be something to look forward to," said Sarah, who might have won an immortal crown had such trophies been awarded to the patience of daughters-in-law. "So you didn't buy that steer, Abel?"

"No, I didn't buy it."

"Have you seen Judy to-day?"

"I stopped there on my way home. She was making butter, and we talked about buying an extra cow or two and letting Blossom and her send some to market."

"Well it beats me!" observed Sarah, but whether her discomfiture was due to Judy's butter or to Abel's love making, she did not explain. On the whole the staidness of the courtship was pleasing to her. Her sense of decorum was flattered by it, for she had as little tolerance of the softer virtues as of the softer vines. It had been years since she had felt so indulgent toward her second son; yet in spite of the gratification his dejection afforded her, she was, as she had just confessed, utterly and entirely "beat." His period of common sense—of perfect and complete sobriety—had lasted for half a year, but she was too shrewd a woman to be deceived by the mere external calmness of appearances. She had had moreover, a long experience with males of the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate "rousing." All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability—to that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked.

If anything could have put her into a cheerful humour, it would have been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of human happiness—as something which must be paid for, either literally in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials of salvation.

"I declar' things are goin' on so smooth that something must be gettin' ready to happen," she said anxiously to herself at least twenty times a day—for she had observed life, and in her opinion, the observation had verified the rigid principles of her religion. Do what you would the doctrines of original sin and predestination kept cropping up under the surface of existence. And so—"It looks all right on top, but you never can tell," was the habitual attitude of her mind.

When dinner was over, Abel went out to the mill, with Moses, the hound, trotting at his heels. The high wind was still blowing, and while he stood by the mill-race, the boughs of the sycamore rocked back and forth over his head with a creaking noise. At each swing of the branches a crowd of broad yellow leaves was torn from the stems and chased over the moving wheel to the open meadow beyond.

With the key of the mill in his hand, Abel stopped to gaze over the green knoll where he had once planned to build his house. Beyond it he saw the strip of pines, and he knew that the tallest of the trees had fallen uselessly beneath his axe. The great trunk still lay there, fast rotting to dust on the carpet of pine cones. He had never sold it for timber. He would never use it for the rafters of his home.

As he looked back now all that past life of his appeared to him fair and desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood, and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its fullest—that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the past, and he thought of himself as always eager and enthusiastic then, as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year when he had gone away, and worked in the factory in order to educate himself, was revealed as a period of delightful promise, of wonderful opportunity. In remembering his love for Molly, he forgot the quarrels, the jealousies, the heartburnings, and recalled only the exquisite instant of their first lover's kiss. Then, he told himself, that even while he had enjoyed his life, it had cheated him, and he would not live it over again if he could.

Turning presently in the other direction, he discerned a patch of vivid blue in the pasture, and knew that it was Blossom crossing the fields to Solomon Hatch's. "She's gone a good piece out of her road," he thought, and then, "I wonder why she doesn't marry? She might have anybody about here if she wasn't so particular." The vivid blue spot in the midst of the russet and brown landscape held his gaze for a moment; then calling Moses to his side, he unlocked the door of the mill and began counting the sacks of grist.

Outside, in the high wind, which made walking difficult, Blossom moved in the direction of the willow copse. Gay had promised to meet her, but she knew, from the experience of the last few months, that he would neither hasten his luncheon nor smoke a cigar the less in order to do so. As she pressed on the wind sang in her ears. She heard it like the sound of rushing wings in the broomsedge, and when it died down, she waited for it to rise again with a silken murmur in the red-topped orchard grass. She could tell from the sound whether the gust was still in the field of broomsedge or had swept on to the pasture.

In spite of her blue dress, in spite of the flush in her cheeks and the luminous softness in her eyes, the joy in her bosom fluttered on crippled wings. Gay was kind, he was gentle, he was even solicitous on the rare occasions when she saw him; but somehow—in some way, it was different from the ideal marriage of which she had dreamed. If he was kind, he was also casual. She had hoped once that love would fill her life, and now, to her despair, it looked as if it might be poured into a tea-cup. She had imagined that it would move mountains, and the most ordinary detail of living was sufficient to thrust it out of sight.

When she reached the brook, she saw Gay coming slowly along the Haunt's Walk, to the spring. As he walked, he blew little clouds of smoke into the air, and she thought, as he approached her, that the smell of his cigar was unlike the cigar of any other man she knew—that it possessed, in itself, a quality that was exciting and romantic. This trait in his personality—a disturbing suggestion of the atmosphere of a richer world—had fascinated her from the beginning, and after eighteen months of repeated disappointments, it still held her, though she struggled now in its power like a hare in a trap.

"So you're here!" he exclaimed as he reached her. Then, after a swift glance over the fields, he drew her into the shelter of the trees, and holding his cigar in his left hand, kissed her lips.

Closing her eyes, she leaned against him, while the scent of tobacco intoxicated her with its train of happier associations.

"You're looking all right, though your letters have been rather jumpy. My dear girl, when you pounce on me like that you frighten me out of my wits. You really mustn't, you know."

"O Jonathan!" she gasped, and clung to him.

"Why, I had to manufacture some excuse on the instant for coming down. I couldn't tell what foolishness you'd be capable of if I didn't."

His tone was half caressing, yet beneath it there was a serious annoyance, which killed the suffering joy in her heart. She was slowly learning that it is not safe to remind the man of pleasure of his obligations, since he is attracted chiefly by his opportunities.

"The time was when you wanted to come just as much as I," she said.

"Don't I still? Haven't I proved it by telling a tremendous lie and rushing down here on the first train? Come, now, kiss me like a good girl and look cheerful. You've got to make up, you know, for all the trouble you've put me to."

She kissed him obediently, yielding to his casual embraces with a docility that would have charmed him had his passion been in its beginning instead of its decline.

"You're glad now you came, aren't you?" she asked presently pleading to be reassured.

"Oh, yes, of course, I like it, but you mustn't write to me that way again."

Putting his arm closer about her, he pressed her to his side, and they sat in silence while the wind whistled in the tree-tops above them. From their shelter they could see the empty chimneys of Jordan's Journey, and a blurred and attenuated figure on the lawn, which was that of the old negro, who passed back and forth spreading manure. Some swallows with slate grey wings were flying over the roof, and they appeared from a distance to whirl as helplessly as the dead leaves.

"You do love me as much as ever, don't you, Jonathan?" she asked suddenly.

He frowned, staring at the moving figure of the old negro. Again she had blundered, for he was disinclined by temperament to do or say the thing that was expected of him.

"Why, of course I do," he answered after a pause.

She sighed and nestled against him, while his hand which had been on her shoulder, slipped to her waist. Her heart had turned to lead in her breast, and, like Judy, she could have wept because the reality of love was different from her virgin dreams.



CHAPTER III

ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION

Two nights before the wedding a corn shucking was held in the barn at Bottom's Ordinary—a usually successful form of entertainment, by which the strenuous labours of a score of able-bodied men were secured at the cost of a keg of cider and a kettle of squirrel stew. In the centre of the barn, which was dimly lighted by a row of smoky, strong-smelling kerosene-oil lanterns, suspended on pegs from the wall, there was a huge wooden bin, into which the golden ears were tossed, as they were stripped of the husks, by a circle of guests, ranging in years from old Adam at the head to the youngest son of Tim Mallory, an inquisitive urchin of nine, who made himself useful by passing the diminishing pitcher of cider. It was a frosty night, and the faces of the huskers showed very red above the knitted woollen comforters which wrapped their throats. Before each man there was a small pile of corn, still in the blade, and this was replenished when it began to dwindle by a band of workers in the moonlight beyond the open windows. In his effort to keep warm somebody had started a hymn, which was vigorously accompanied by a beating of numbed feet on the scattered husks on the floor. Above the volume of sound old Adam's quavering falsetto could be heard piping on like a cracked and discordant flute.

"O-ver thar, O-ver thar, Th-ar's a la-nd of pure de-light. O-ver th-ar, We will la-y our bur-den do-wn. An' re-ceive our gol-den cro-wn. In that la-nd of pure de-light O-ver th-ar."

"That's a cold hymn, an' unsuitable to the weather," remarked Tim Mallory at the end of the verse. "If you ask me, I'd say thar was mo' immediate comfort in singin' about the redness of hell-fire, an' how mortal close we're comin' to it."

"We don't want no impiousness at this here shuckin', Tim," observed William Ming, who occupied the position of host in Betsey's absence about the more important matter of supper. "You fill up with cider an' go at that thar pile befo' you."

"Then pass it on," replied Mallory, reaching for the jug of cider, which travelled in a regular orbit from old Adam's right hand round the circle to the neighbour on his left, who chanced to be Solomon Hatch.

"Speakin' of impiousness," remarked that sour-faced little man, "have you all heard the tales about Reuben Merryweather's gal sence she's had her windfall? Why, to see the way she trails her skirt, you'd think she was the real child of her father." Then rushing hurriedly to generalization at Abel's entrance, he added in a louder tone—"Ah, it's a sad pass for things to come to, an' the beginnin' of the end of public morality, when a gal that's born of a mischance can come to act as if a man was responsible for her. It ain't nothin' mo' nor less than flyin' in the face of the law, which reads different, an' if it keeps up, the women folks will be settin' up the same rights as men to all the instincts of natur'."

Old Adam—the pride and wonder of the neighbourhood because he could still walk his half mile with the help of his son and still drink his share of cider with the help of nobody—bent over the heap of corn before him, and selecting an ear, divested it of the husks with a twirling, sleight-of-hand movement.

"They're losing virtue fast enough," he observed, throwing the naked ear into the bin and reaching for another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty."

"Ah, the times have changed now!" sighed Solomon Hatch, "but thar's one thing sho' to my mind, an' that is, that if a woman thinks she's goin' to attract men by pryin' an' peekin' into immorality an' settin' it straight ag'in, she's gone clean out of her head. Thar's got to be indecency in the world because thar al'ays has been. But a man sets a heap mo' sto' by his wife if she ain't too inquirin' upon the subject."

"True, true, Solomon," said old Adam, "I for one was al'ays set against teachin' women to read for fear they'd come to know things. Thar's a deal of evil that gits into print, an' if you ain't acquainted with yo' letters thar's less temptation to nose arter it. Reuben Merryweather would have his daughter Janet taught, though I urged strongly against it—holdin' that she could learn about sins an' immoralities even in Holy Writ. Who knows if she'd ever have gone wrong if she hadn't learned to read printed words?"

"Well, I'm glad print is too difficult for me," observed young Adam. "The pains I take to spell out the words would stand greatly in the way of my enj'yin' any immorality if I was to stumble across it. What part of Scripture, pa, is it that deals with sech doin's?"

"They crop up powerful thick in Kings, son, but I've found 'em when I looked sharp in Leviticus."

"If you are goin' to talk free, men, you can go to yo' own homes to do it," remarked Betsey, who was accustomed to appear at unexpected moments in order to impress them with the necessity of earning their supper. "This ain't no place for loose speakin'," she added, solemnly eyeing young Adam, who, having a weak memory, was striving to fix the names of Kings and Leviticus in his mind by repeating them slowly to himself.

"Axin' yo' pardon, Mrs. Bottom, we didn't know a lady was in hearin' or we'd never have made so bold," said old Adam. "Stop workin' yo' lips, son, an' hand Mrs. Bottom a cheer."

"What's all this talk anyway about Molly Merryweather an' Mr. Jonathan?" she demanded. "Abel, have you heard anything about it?"

The men glanced at each other with uneasy eyes, while they worked nervously at the shucking, for the question had been in the air from the moment of Abel's entrance, though none of them had been bold enough to speak it aloud. And now a woman, with characteristic feminine recklessness, had uttered the thought which had been revolving in each mind for ten minutes—yet nothing had happened!

Old Adam, pausing for the first time in his work, glanced with ungrudging respect at the short, lumpy figure in the black calico dress. Her face was still comely, and there was the mild mulishness in her expression that is seen in the countenances of many amiable yet obstinate persons.

"No, I haven't heard," replied Abel, and he added a moment later, "What do they say?"

"Well, Mr. Halloween had it from a man in Applegate who had it from a man in Petersburg who had it from a man in Richmond."

"Had what?"

"That Mr. Jonathan had been waitin' on her steady for some months, an' 'twas mo' likely than not to end in marriage. She's a good girl, is Molly. I ain't got no use for a woman that don't stand up for her sex in the face of men."

"True, true," admitted her hearers solemnly, one after another, for none among them had ever dared to defy the source of so many benefactions.

"Thar're some that thinks morals ain't meant for any but women," she pursued, "but I ain't one of 'em, as William Ming can testify, that holds to that view. Viciousness is viciousness whether it be male or female, and Mr. Mullen himself in the pulpit couldn't convince me that it don't take two to make an impropriety."

"True, true," they repeated, belying themselves under coercion in the accents of the chorus in a Greek drama. "'Tis true, ma'am, as you speak it."

"Thar were some mean enough to side against the po' innocent from the hour of her birth," she continued oracularly, while she looked severely at Solomon, who nodded in response, "an' these same folks have been preachin' over her an' pintin' at her ever sence she larned to crawl out of the cradle. But thar never was a kinder heart or a quicker hand in trouble than Molly's, an' if she did play fast and loose with the men, was it any worse, I'd like to know, than they deserve?"

"Thar's truth in what you say, ma'am, thar's a deal of truth in it," they agreed, nodding dejected craven heads over their pipes. Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.

"Well, I'm roastin' a young possum along with the squirrel stew, so you'd better work up an appetite," she said in a mollified tone at at the end of her lecture, as though she were desirous of infusing a more ardent spirit into them before her departure.

When the barn door closed behind her, a sigh of relief, half stifled through fear of detection, passed round the group.

"Thar goes a woman in a thousand," observed old Adam, edging nearer the bin.

"In a million—let's make it a million," urged Solomon Hatch.

"If they were all like that the world would be different, Mr. Doolittle," remarked Jim Halloween.

"Ah, yes, it would be different," agreed old Adam, and he sighed again.

"Thar'd be strict walkin' among us, I reckon," said his son.

"An' a chalk line the same as we draw for the sex," added Solomon Hatch.

"Sin would be scarce then an' life earnest," remarked William Ming, who had alluded to Betsey in the most distant terms ever since he had married her.

"We'd abide by the letter like the women, not by the spirit as we do," reflected Solomon.

They sighed for the third time more heavily, and the dried husks on the floor around the bin rattled as though a strong wind had entered.

"But she's one in a million, Mr. Doolittle," protested Solomon, after a pause, and his tone had grown cheerful.

"Yes, I reckon it's a million. Thar ain't mo' than one in a million of that rare sort," responded old Adam, falling to work with a zest.

"Was that ar young possum she spoke of the one yo' dawg Bess treed day befo' yesterday, William?" inquired Jim Halloween, whose hopes were centred upon the reward of his labours.

"Naw! that was an old un," replied William. "But thar never was a better possum dawg than that Bess of ours. I declar, she's got so much sense that she'll tree anything that grins at her, whether it's nigger or possum. Ain't that so, old gal?" he inquired of the spotted hound on a bed of husks at his side. "It wan't no longer than last week that she kept that little nigger of Uncle Boaz's up a persimmon tree for mo'n an hour."

"Thar's some niggers that look so much like possums when they git up in persimmon branches that it takes a sharp eye to tell the difference," observed Tim Mallory.

"Well, I'm partial to possum," remarked old Adam. "When all's said, thar ain't a better meat to the taste as long as it's plump an' juicy. Will you hand on that jug of cider, Tim? It's wonderful the way corn shuckin' manages to parch the throat an' whet the appetite."

The miller, who had declined Betsey's feast of possum, went out as soon as he had finished his pipe, and turned into the sunken road that led to Solomon Hatch's. In the little "best room," which was opened only for "courtings" or funerals, he found Judy seated under a dim lamp with a basket of darning in her lap.

"I was over at Mrs. Mullen's this morning," she explained, "an' she told me her eyesight was failing, so I offered to do her darnin'."

Slipping a small round gourd into the toe of a man's black sock, she examined it attentively, with her needle poised in the lamplight. Then bending her head slightly sideways, she surveyed her stitches from another angle, while she smoothed the darn with short caressing strokes over the gourd. He thought how capable and helpful she was, and from the cheerful energy with which she plied her needle, he judged that it gave her pleasure merely to be of use. What he did not suspect was that her wedding garments had been thrust aside as of less importance than Mrs. Mullen's basket of darning. She was just the girl for a farmer's wife, he told himself as he watched her—plain and sensible, the kind that would make a good mother and a good manager. And all the time a voice in the back of his brain was repeating distinctly. "They say it will end in a marriage—they say it will end in a marriage." But this voice seemed to come from a distance, and to have no connection either with his thought or with his life. It was independent of his will, and while it was speaking, he went on calmly thinking of Judy's children and of how well and properly she would bring them up.

"I went over again to look at the steer to-day," he said, after a moment. "There's a Jersey cow, too, I think of buying."

She nodded, pausing in her work, yet keeping her gaze fixed on the point of her needle. If he had looked at her darning, he would have seen that it was woven of exquisite and elaborate stitches—such stitches as went into ecclesiastical embroideries in the Middle Ages.

"They're the best kind for butter," she observed, and carefully ran her needle crosswise in and out of the threads.

Conversation was always desultory between them, and when it flagged, as it did now, they could sit for hours in the composed and unembarrassed silence of persons who meet upon the firm basis of mutual assistance in practical matters. Their relation was founded upon the simple law of racial continuance, which is as indifferent to the individual as it is to the abstract, apotheosis of passion.

"I'm going to Applegate to-morrow to order a new mill-stone," he said at last, when he rose. "Is there anything you would like me to get for you?"

She reflected a moment. "I need a quarter of a yard of braid to finish the green dress I am making. Could you match it?"

"I'll try if you'll give me a sample."

Laying her work aside for the first time, she hunted amid a number of coloured spools in her basket, and brought to light a bit of silver braid, which she handed to him.

"Was Mr. Mullen at your house to-day, Abel?" she asked suddenly, turning her face from the lamp.

"Yes, he comes to see Blossom now, but she doesn't appear to care for him. I thought she did once, didn't you?"

"Yes, I thought she did, but that was when he was in love with Molly, wasn't it?"

For an instant he gazed at the bit of braid, as though his soul were intent upon unravelling the intricate pattern.

"I wonder whether it is that we get a thing when we stop wanting it or that we merely stop wanting it when we get it?" he demanded passionately of fate.

But Judy had no mind for dubious philosophies. The thing she wanted she knew she should never get and she knew as well that, in all likelihood, she should never stop wanting it. Only a passionate soul in a commonplace body could have squandered itself with such superb prodigality.

"I don't know," she answered wearily, "I've never noticed much either what people get or what they want."

"Well, Blossom wanted Mr. Mullen once and now he wants Blossom. I wish mother didn't have so poor an opinion of him."

She flushed and looked up quickly, for in her heart she felt that she hated Sarah Revercomb. A disgust for her coming marriage swept over her. Then she told herself stubbornly that everybody married sooner or later, and that anyway her stepmother would never forgive her if she broke off with Abel.

"She doesn't even go to his church. I don't see what right she has to find fault with him," she said.

"That's her way, you know. You can't make her over. She pretends he doesn't know his Scripture and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarrass him. Yesterday she told him she couldn't call to mind the difference in cubits between the length and the breadth of Solomon's temple, and would he please save her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out?"

"Does she want him to stop coming?" inquired Judy, breathlessly.

"I don't know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don't you?"

"Don't I?" she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor, where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern. As they were gathering them up, their heads touched by accident, and he kissed her gravely. For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his brilliant eyes, "Abel is really very handsome, after all." Then folding her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed the basket on a shelf between a bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of pressed flowers under a glass case. "He couldn't have got anybody to fill in those holes better," she said to herself, and the reflection was not without a balm for her aching heart.

At dawn next morning Abel passed again, driving in the direction of the Applegate road. The day was breaking clear and still, and over the autumnal pageantry in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter of sassafras. Overhead the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond a sharp twist in the corduroy road, a branch of sweet gum curved like a bent flame on the edge of the twilight dimness of the forest. The scarlet of the leaves reminded him of the colour of Molly's jacket, and immediately the voice somewhere in his brain repeated, "They say it will end in marriage." The words awoke in him a violent and unreasonable resentment. He could think of his own marriage quite calmly, as something that did not bear directly upon his ideal of Molly; but the conception of her as Gay's wife, struck a blow at the image he had enskied and then schooled himself into worshipping from a distance. He was willing to relinquish her as too fair and flitting for mortal embraces, but the thought that another man should possess that elusive loveliness was like the thrust of hot iron into his wound. That Molly loved Gay he could not believe. That she was willing to marry him without loving him, was a suggestion which appeared to him little short of an insult. True, he did not love Judy to whom he was to be married to-morrow, but that was a case so entirely and utterly different that there could be no comparison! He was doing it because he was sorry for Judy and it was the only way he could help her. Besides, had not Molly urged such a step upon him repeatedly as the fulfillment of his obvious destiny?

The reasons were all there. He had them labelled and assorted in his mind, ready for instant reference should they be required. Sleepless nights had gone to the preparation of them, and yet—and yet—in his heart he knew, beyond contradiction, that he was wedding Judy because his pity had once made a fool of him. He had acted from the loftiest motives when he had asked her to marry him, and twenty-four hours later he would have given ten years of his life to have been able to eliminate those lofty motives from his character. To go back on her was, of course, out of the question. In the history of Old Church no man—with the exception of two drunkards and old Mr. Jonathan Gay—had ever gone back on a woman. With girls it was different, since they, being sentimentally above the proneness to error as well as practically below the liability for maintenance, might play fast and loose wherever their fleeting fancy alighted. But in the case of his unhappy sex an honourable inclination once yielded to, was established forever. His sacrifice was sanctioned by custom. There was no escape since it was tradition that held him by the throat.

His business in Applegate, which included a careful matching of Judy's braid, took up the entire morning; and it was dinner time before he turned back to the little inn, known as Raleigh's Tavern, at which the farmers usually stopped for meals. Here, after washing his hands in a basin on the back porch, he hastily smoothed his hair, and passed into the small paved court in front of the tavern. As he approached the doorway, the figure of a young woman in a black dress, which he felt instinctively did not "belong" to Applegate, came down the short steps, and paused an instant to caress a large dog that was lying in the sunshine near the entrance. The next minute, while he fell back, hat in hand, behind a pile of boxes in the yard, he heard his name called in a familiar voice, and lifting his eyes found himself face to face with Molly.

"Abel, aren't you going to speak to me?" she asked, and moving a step toward him, held out both hands with an impulsive gesture.

As his hand met hers, he withdrew it quickly as though he were stung by the touch of her soft fingers. Every nerve in his body leaped suddenly to life, and the moment was so vivid while he faced her, that he felt half convinced that all the long months since their parting had dissolved in shadows. The border line between the dream and actuality was obliterated. It seemed to him not only impossible, but absurd that he should ever have believed himself engaged to Judy Hatch—that he should be going to marry her to-morrow! All that side of his life had no closer relation to his real self than it had to the self of old Adam Doolittle. While he had planned it he had been a corpse not a living man, but at the sound of Molly's voice, at the clasp of her fingers, at the touching, expectant brightness in her eyes, the resurrection had happened. Judy was a corpse preparing to wed a corpse that had become alive—and the mating of death with life was abhorrent to him in his illumination.

"We are on our way to Richmond," explained Molly, very gently, "and we are waiting to change trains. Oh, Abel, I have wanted so much to see you!"

It was the old Molly, in truth—Molly in her softest, in her most dangerous, in her divinest mood. While he gazed at her he could make no answer because an emotion that was half self-reproach, half furious longing, choked back his words, and had he opened his lips it would have been to utter some foolish inarticulate arraignment of destiny. In the confusion of his senses, he did not notice that she had altered, but the next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate, like a tinted egg-shell he had once seen, and that her eyes in consequence were wondrously, were almost startlingly, large. All that he was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look, was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart.



CHAPTER IV

HIS DAY OF FREEDOM

He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanically into a street which led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church. A crowd of men, gathered in the doorway of the post-office, called to him to join them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his own ears.

"If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there's a man for you," he heard one of them remark, and knew that they were discussing his political chances. Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end of the street, passed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country.

Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his passion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it. A sense of exhilaration, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession of him. "I won't go back!" he said defiantly, "I won't go back!" And with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous consciousness of his release. It was as if he had burst his bonds by a single effort of strength, and was stretching his cramped limbs in the open. The idea of escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked neither to right or left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break from his pursuers. At the moment he would have bartered his soul in exchange for the unholy, the nameless rapture of the vagabond and the gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization. Duty, love, ambition—all these were nothing beside the perfect, the incommunicable passion of the open road!

It is a mood that comes once to every man—to some men more frequently—a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out for the strong meat of the jungle—for the scent of the raw, dark earth and for the gleam of the yellow moonlight on the wet, rustling leaves. This longing may come but once in adolescence, or many times until the frost of age has withered the senses. It may come amid the showery warmth and the roving fragrance of an April day, or beside the shining, brown, leaf-strewn brooks of November. But let it come to a man when it will, and that man renounces, in spite of himself, his little leaden gods of prosperity, and in his heart, beneath the woven garment of custom, he exchanges his birthright of respectability for a mess of Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and evanescent as shadows.

"I won't go back!" he repeated exultantly, "I won't go back!"

"You're talkin' to yo'self, mister," said a voice at his side, and looking down he saw a small barefooted boy, in overalls, with a bag of striped purple calico hanging from one shoulder.

"You've been talkin' to yo'self all along the road," the boy repeated with zest.

"Have I? What are you up to?"

"I've been chinquapinin'. Ma, she thinks I'm at school, but I ain't." He looked up wickedly, bubbling over with the shameless joys of truancy. "Thar's a lot of chinquapin bushes over yonder in Cobblestone's wood an' they're chock full of nuts."

"And they're in your bag now, I suppose?"

"I've got a peck of 'em, an' I'm goin' to make me a chain as long as—that. It'll be a watch chain, an' I've made a watch out of a walnut. It can't keep time, of course," he added, "'cep'n for that it's really a sho' nough watch." His small freckled face, overhung by a mat of carroty hair, was wreathed in a contagious, an intoxicating smile—the smile of one who has bought happiness at the price of duty, and whose enjoyment is sweetened by the secret knowledge that he has successfully eluded the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God. Instinctively, Abel was aware that the savour was not in the chinquapins, but in the disobedience, and his heart warmed to the boy with the freckled face.

"Are you going home now?" he asked.

"You bet I ain't. I've got my snack ma fixed for me." He unrolled a brown paper package and revealed two thin slices of bread with a fishing hook stuck in one corner. "Thar's apple-butter between 'em," he added, rolling his tongue, and a minute later, "Ma'd whip me jest the same, an' I'd ruther be whipped for a whole day than for a half. Besides," he burst out as though the mental image convulsed him with delight, "if I went home I'd have to help her tote the water for the washin'."

"But what are you going to do with yourself?"

"I'm goin' huntin' with a gravel shooter, an' I'm goin' fishin' with a willow pole, an' I'm goin' to find all the old hare traps, an' I'm goin' to see 'em make hog's meat over at Bryarly's an' I'm goin' to the cider pressin' down here at Cobblestone's. She ain't goin' to ketch me till I've had my day!" he concluded with a whoop of ecstasy. Startled by the sound, a rabbit sprang from a clump of sassafras, and the boy was over the fence, on a rush of happy bare feet, in pursuit of it.

The road curved abruptly into a short wood, filled with dwarfed holly trees, which were sown thickly with a shower of scarlet berries—and while Abel walked through it, his visions thronged beside him like the painted and artificial troupe of a carnival. He saw Molly coming to him, separating him from Judy, surrendering her warm flesh and blood to his arms. "I won't go back!" he said, still defiantly, "I'll love Molly if I pay for it to the last day I live." With a terrible exultation he felt that he was willing to pay for it—to pay any price, even the price of his honour. His passion rushed like flame through his blood, scorching, blackening, devouring.