Beyond the wood, the winding ash-coloured road dipped into a hollow, and when he reached the brow of the low hill ahead, a west wind, which had risen suddenly from the river, caught up with his footsteps and raced on like a wild thing at his side. He could hear it sighing plaintively in the bared trees he had left, or driving the hurtled leaves like a flock of frightened partridges over the sumach and sassafras, and then lashing itself into a frenzy as it chased over a level of broomsedge. Always it sang of freedom—of the savage desire and thirst for freedom—of the ineffable, the supreme ecstasy of freedom! And always while he listened to it, while he felt the dead leaves stinging his flesh, he told himself passionately that he "would not go back—that he would not marry to-morrow!"

For hours he stalked with the wind. Then, turning out of the road, he flung himself down on the broomsedge and lay for other hours gazing over the autumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon. Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he had "had his day."

At nine o'clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood, twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables, ordered something to eat. His limbs ached, not from the walk in the wind, but from the passion that had whipped his body like a destroying fire. He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left. Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing—he could desire nothing—he could remember nothing. Everything was over except the instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed.

While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed in his hands, there came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the things from which he had fled. For an instant he could only stare blindly back at him. Then something which had opened in his soul, closed softly, as if it were a shell of custom, and he knew that he was again a prisoner. With the sight of that conventional figure, the scattered instincts of habit and of respectability—of all the qualities for which the race stood and against which the individual had rebelled—all these rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his insurgent emotions.

"I suppose you're waiting, like myself, for the nine-forty-five train?"

"Yes, I'm waiting for the train."

"Business brought you so far away?"

"Yes, business brought me." Lifting his glass of beer, he drained it slowly under Mr. Mullen's friendly and curious eyes.

"It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding," remarked the rector, after a pause. "Like you, I was called off on an urgent matter, but fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep."

Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat at his side.

It was two o'clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill, and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture. As he crossed the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a night of love.



CHAPTER V

THE SHAPING OF MOLLY

Leaning back in the uncomfortable plush-covered chair in the train to Richmond, Molly watched the flat landscape glide past, while she thought a little wistfully of the morning she had made this same trip dressed in one of Mrs. Gay's gowns. On her knees Mrs. Gay's canary, extinguished beneath the black silk cover to his cage, uttered from time to time a feeble pipe of inquiry, and on the rack above her head Mrs. Gay's tea basket rattled loudly in a sudden lurch of the train. Since the hour in which she had left the overseer's cottage and moved into the "big house" at Jordan's Journey, the appealing little lady had been the dominant influence in her life—an influence so soft and yet so overpowering that she had at times a sensation of being smothered in scented swansdown. For several months after leaving Old Church her education had absorbed her energies, and she had found time merely to gasp occasionally in the oppressive sweetness of the atmosphere which Mrs. Gay's personality diffused. Everything was strange then, and her desire for strangeness, for unfamiliar impressions, had amounted to a passion. She had been very anxious, too, very much afraid lest she should make a mistake. When she had entered the hotel dining-room in New York she had felt as if she were walking on ploughed ground, and the red velvet carpet had seemed to rise and sink under her feet. That first night had been exquisite torture to her, and so, she surmised through some intuitive understanding, had it been to Kesiah. For weeks after that time of embarrassment, she had watched herself carefully—watched every instant—and in the end she had triumphed. With her growing ease, her old impulsiveness had returned to her, and with the wonderful adaptability of the Southern woman, she had soon ceased to feel a sense of discomfort in her changed surroundings. The instinct of class she had never had, and this lack of social reverence had helped her not a little in her ascent of the ladder. It is difficult to suffer from a distinction which one does not admit—and her perfect unconsciousness of inferiority to Mrs. Gay had placed her, without her being aware of it, in the position of an equal.

With her hands clasped on the cage of the canary, she gazed thoughtfully at Kesiah, who was sitting a little in front of her, with her eyeglasses on her nose and the daily paper opened before her. Gay was to meet them in Richmond, and as Molly remembered this now, she realized that her feeling about their meeting had changed during the last few hours. She liked Gay—she responded to his physical charm, to the indefinable air of adventure which hangs sometimes about men who have lived hard without wasting their surplus vitality—but in spite of the strong attraction he possessed for her, she knew that in her heart she had never thoroughly believed in him. Unconsciously to herself she had measured his stature against Abel's and he had come short of her standard.

"Molly," asked Mrs. Gay, turning her head suddenly, "did you write Jonathan to expect us by this train?"

"Yes, Aunt Angela, he knows we are coming. Shall I lower the shade? Is the sunlight too strong on you?"

"A little," murmured Mrs. Gay in a tone of resigned sweetness and the conversation was over.

At the sound of Molly's voice an old lady, travelling South with a trained nurse, turned in her chair, and looked at the girl as she might have looked at a fruit for which she longed, but which she had been forbidden to touch. Her face, under an elaborate bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria, was withered and crossed with lines, and her poor old hands were so knotted from gout that she could hardly lift the tea-cup from the small table which had been fastened in front of her. Yet for one instant, as she gazed on Molly's girlish freshness, her youth stirred feebly somewhere in the dregs of her memory, and her eyes grew deprecating and piteous, as though her soul were saying, "I know I have missed it, but it isn't my fault—-"

The tea-cup trembled in her hand, and her old lips fumbled pathetically for her bit of toast, while across from her, with only the narrow aisle of the car between, youth incarnate sat weaving its separate dream of a universe.

"Yes, two hours earlier," ran Molly's thoughts, "I looked forward to the meeting with Jonathan, and now, in so short a time, I have grown to dread it." She tried to think of his pleasant, well-coloured face, of his whimsical, caressing smile, but in the niche where his image should have stood, she saw Abel in his country clothes, with his red-brown throat rising out of his blue shirt and his brilliant eyes under the dark hair on his forehead. Then suddenly memory played her a ridiculous trick, for she remembered that his hair grew in a close clipped circular wave, like the hair which has been bound by a fillet on the head of a child.

"I wonder why he wouldn't speak to me?" she thought, with a pang. "I wonder if he has really got over caring?" She had always thought of Abel as a possession more absolutely her own than even Mr. Jonathan's provision. When she had said so passionately that she wanted to be free, she had not meant that at any minute she chose, Abel would not be ready and willing to fly back into bondage. That Abel, after all these years, should actually have ceased to care for her—should have refused even to speak to her! It was absurd—it was vindictive—it was unchristian! She had half a mind to get Mr. Mullen to talk to him. Then her heart throbbed when she remembered the touch of his hand, the look in his eyes, the thirst of his lips seeking hers. That was only six months ago—such a very little while—and now he had rushed away from the sight of her! She thought of their parting, when she had said that she wanted to see the world, and he had offered at once to release her. Since then she had seen the world until she was tired of it. At times she had been terribly homesick for Old Church, and she had never been happy except when Gay had taken her to see pictures or into wonderful parks. Always the thought had lain hidden in her mind that some day, when she could stand it no longer, she would go back and wear her red jacket and run free in the fields with Abel again. Her very selfishness had seemed natural to her because Abel had always been there, like the air and the sky and the broomsedge; he was a part of the scene, and she found it impossible to detach him from his surroundings.

At the station in Richmond, Gay met them, and for the first few minutes his mother absorbed his attention. Molly had not seen him for six weeks, and she noticed that he had grown fleshier and that this lent an additional heaviness to his shaven chin. Even his charming smile could not disguise the slight coarseness of feature, with which he was beginning already to pay for his pleasures. By the time he was forty, he would be quite stout and "lumpy," she thought.

There was much excitement about collecting Mrs. Gay's packages, and the drive to the hotel was filled with anxious inquiries from Kesiah, who was always nervous and fussy when she travelled.

"Molly, did you see my umbrella put in?"

"Yes, Aunt Kesiah, it is here in the corner by Jonathan."

"I forgot to notice Angela's medicine case. Did you see that it wasn't overlooked?"

"Yes, Patsey has it."

Then came a solicitous exhibition of filial affection on the part of Gay, and at last, to Molly's relief, they arrived at the new, brilliantly lighted hotel, and were led through stifling corridors, carpeted in red, to their rooms on the second floor in the front of the building. As she passed over the velvet carpets, Molly had again the sensation that she was walking over ploughed ground; and when she had escaped from Mrs. Gay's sitting-room, on the pretext of dressing for dinner, she threw open the window, and leaned out of the close atmosphere into the freshness of the November evening. This was what she had once looked upon as pleasure—or at least as exciting amusement—to move continually from one hot and over furnished hotel to another, to fuss about missing packages, to see crowds of strange faces passing before her, all fat and overfed and all, somehow, looking exactly alike.

A wave of homesickness for the white roads and the golden broomsedge of Old Church swept over her. She wanted the open fields, and more than all, far more than all, she wanted Abel! It was her fault—she had made her choice—no one else was to blame for it. And, then, though she had made her choice and no one else was to blame for it, she felt that she almost hated old Mr. Jonathan, as she still called him in her thoughts, because he had left her his money. At the bottom of her heart, there was the perfectly unreasonable suspicion that he had arranged the whole thing out of spite.

In the sitting-room, meanwhile, which Kesiah's bedroom separated from Molly's, Mrs. Gay was lying on a couch beside a table on which stood a cut-glass bowl of purple orchids sent to her by her son. She was looking a little pale, but this pallor was not unbecoming since it enhanced the expression of appealing melancholy in her eyes. To look at her was to recognize that life had crushed her, and yet that her soul exhaled an intense sweetness in the midst of its suffering.

Jonathan had just gone down to buy the evening papers; in the next room she could hear Kesiah at the unpacking; so she was left for a moment alone with her imagination. The fatigue of the trip had affected her nerves, and she sank, while she lay there in her travelling gown, which she had not yet removed, into one of those spells of spiritual discontent which followed inevitably any unusual physical discomfort. She thought, not resentfully but sadly, that Kesiah managed to grow even more obstinate with years, that Jonathan must have tired of her or he would never have forgotten the list of medicines she had sent him, that Molly took Kesiah away from the sickroom entirely too often. From these reflections she drifted naturally into an emotion of self pity, and the thought occurred to her, as it did invariably in such hours of depression, that her world had never been large enough for the full exercise and appreciation of her highest qualities. If she had only lived in a richer century amid more congenial surroundings! Who could tell what her usefulness might have been had not destiny continually thwarted her aspirations? Before the idea of this thwarted usefulness, which was always vaguely associated with the moral regeneration of distinguished historic sinners of the opposite sex, like Lord Byron or Alfred de Musset, she began to feel that she had been not only neglected, but wasted in the atmosphere in which she had been placed.

Jonathan's entrance, with the evening papers in his hand, broke the thread of her reverie, and as he sat down in a chair by her side, she wondered if he had inherited her "nature" and if he, also, cherished in his soul the same spiritual yearnings? Her wonder was, however, entirely unnecessary, for Jonathan had very little imagination, and would never have wasted his time yearning over a sinner whom he had never seen.

"I stopped a minute to get into my evening clothes," he said, in the cheerful voice of one who is a stranger to aspirations of soul. "I thought Molly would be dressed by this time. She is usually so quick."

"Yes, she is usually very quick," replied Mrs. Gay gently, while she gathered all the forces of her character, which were slightly disorganized by her recent indulgence in pensive musings, to do battle against an idea which she had striven repeatedly of late to banish from her thoughts. "I wish, dear Jonathan," she added, "that you would speak a few words to Molly. You have such influence with her, and I am sure I don't wonder."

"I'll speak them with pleasure, mother. Just drop me a hint as to what they are to be about."

"She's a sweet, unselfish girl, we all know that, but there are times, dear, especially when strangers are present, when she appears a little—well, a little crude—you know what I mean?"

"I fancy I know, but I don't see just what we are to do about it. You might as well attempt to reshape Molly's nose as her character. Let's admit that both might be improved and then give up the job. She's got charm—there's no doubt of that. I believe even if she were plain she'd be almost as attractive. Why, I've seen her when she was very nearly plain sometimes, and she hasn't been a whit less fascinating than when she's looking her prettiest. It's the infinite variety and all that, you know. Her soul does it, I suppose."

"Yes, she must have charm," replied Mrs. Gay, ignoring what he had said about "soul" because she felt a vague dislike to hearing a word applied indiscriminately to others which had become, as it were, associated with herself. "I can't analyze it, however, for she hasn't a single really perfect feature except her eyes."

"But such eyes! In the sunlight they are nearer the colour of a humming-birds wing than anything I know of."

"I suppose they are rather unusual, but, after all a fine pair of eyes can't make exactly a—well, a lady, Jonathan."

"The deuce!" he ejaculated, and then added quickly, "What has she done now, mother?"

One of Mrs. Gay's first principles of diplomacy was that an unpleasant fact treated as non-existent, was deprived in a measure of its power for evil. By the application of this principle, she had extinguished her brother-in-law's passion for Janet Merryweather, and she hoped that it would prove equally effective in blighting her son's incipient fancy for Molly. She looked upon Jonathan's infatuation as a mere sinister shadow as yet, but she was shrewd enough to suspect that the shadow would be converted into substance at the first hint of her recognition that it was impending. Indirect influence alone remained to her, and she surmised that her ultimate triumph would depend upon the perfection of her indirectness. When it came to the game of strategy, Jonathan, being of an open nature, was no match for his mother. He was inclined by temperament to accept things at their face value—particularly women—and not to worry about them unless they interfered with his appetite. When he lost his desire for his meals, then he began, somewhat to his surprise, to consider them seriously.

"Of course I feel just as you do about it," remarked Mrs. Gay, after a weighty silence. "I'm fond of her and I see her good points—but there's something about her—I suppose it's the strain of Merryweather blood, or the fact of her being born in such unfortunate circumstances—" Her manner grew severer. "But—whatever the cause, it shows itself in a kind of social defiance that would always keep her from being just—oh, well, you know—-"

"She's bright enough, mother, she's quick enough, and she's pretty enough, isn't she?"

"She would be, Jonathan, if her defiance did not come from pure wilfulness. But she says and does the most unconventional things simply for the pleasure of shocking people. It isn't that she doesn't know, it's that she doesn't care."

"But she'll get to care—all women do, if you give them time." His tone implied that the whole sex was comprised in an elementary branch of psychology which he had mastered with the help of a few simple rules of analogy.

"Well, she may, dear, but I doubt it. She is as absolutely without class instinct as an anarchist, I believe. When she lived in the overseer's cottage she never looked up and now that she has come out of it, she never looks down. We've told her repeatedly that she mustn't talk to strangers about that part of her life, but it isn't the least bit of use. Only a few days ago I heard her telling Judge Grayson that nobody appeared to do any 'courting' in New York."

To her amazement he burst into a laugh.

"By Jove, I suppose she misses it," he returned, "but what about that fellow she picked up in the North who hung around her last summer?"

"Oh, there have been plenty of them hanging about her. Molly is the kind, you know, that will have lovers wherever you put her." There was a faint condescension in her voice, for she herself preferred adorers to lovers.

"But she hasn't seemed to care about them," he said. "I believe she has grown tired of flirting."

"I'm sure she doesn't flirt with them, and I think it's all because she is pining for somebody she left at Old Church—the miller or the rector or somebody we've never even heard of."

"What's that?" he started a little, and she saw at once that, although she had used her most delicate weapon, he had flinched from the first touch of the blade. "I'm positive she hadn't a real fancy for anybody down there," he added, as he relapsed into his attitude of indifference.

"I know she says so, Jonathan, but there are other ways of telling."

"Oh, there's no truth in that—it's all nonsense," he said irritably.

Then a door creaked in the hall, there was a rustle of silken skirts on the carpet, and Molly, having dried her tears, came in, pliant, blushing, and eager to please them both.



CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY

She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She's a dear good girl, and just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like a cad to her," he thought.

That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to himself with an additional emphasis—for when the woman before him in flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness.

"What's the matter, little girl?" he asked.

"Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church—to-morrow!" she said.

"Why in thunder do you want to do that?"

"There's something I must see about. I can't wait. I never can wait when I want anything."

"So I have observed. This something is so important, by the way, that you haven't thought of it for six months?"

"Well, I've thought of it—sometimes," she admitted.

"Can't you tell me what it is, Molly?"

She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it was, it had obviously enriched her beauty.

"Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he means to me."

This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely murmured:

"I can't, Jonathan, you would never understand." Her whole being was vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide experience with the passion, she knew that he would not comprehend what she meant by the word. It wasn't his kind of love in the least that she wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the blaze of a prairie fire. "It's just a feeling," she added, helplessly. "You don't have feelings, I suppose?"

"Don't I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!"

"While they last—but they don't last, you know, they have their seasons. That's the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn't it?"

But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes.

"All the same I want to go," she repeated obstinately.

Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache.

"Molly," he asked, "have you been thinking again about the miller?"

"How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly.

The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry!

"Well, I'm glad you haven't—because, you know, really it wouldn't do," he answered.

"What wouldn't do?"

"Your marrying a Revercomb—it wouldn't do in the least."

"Why wouldn't it?"

"You can see that for yourself, can't you? You've come entirely out of that life and you couldn't go back to it."

"I don't see why I couldn't if I wanted to?" she threw out at him with sudden violence.

Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn't agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands!

"Well, in the first place, I don't believe you'd ever want to," he said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you'd regret it in ten minutes."

"If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it," was her amazing rejoinder.

Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge.

"You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd be sorry before you got up to the altar."

"I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it."

"You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?"

"I like raising chickens."

"And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would sacrifice—for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?"

"I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the same everywhere."

"The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any difference?"

"No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks—they seem more human, somehow."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what's got into you to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you've begun to idealize the miller now you've been away from him. He's a handsome fellow; you don't see his physical match in a day, I'm willing to admit, but if you went back again you'd be surprised to find how—well, how rustic he would appear to you."

The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden droop of her lashes.

"He's better than any one I've seen anywhere," she replied, "he's bigger, he's stronger, he's kinder. I'm not good enough to marry him, and I know it."

For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had never indulged in verbal excesses. Then he said, coldly; "So you're working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child, if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing such folly was intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant, and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise superior to reason.

"I don't care how poor he is," said Molly passionately, for her rational part was plainly not in the ascendant. "Nobody ever thought about his being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money. He was honestly born and I wasn't, yet he didn't care. He was big and splendid and I was little and mean, that was the matter!"

"By George, you're in love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang. Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with his angry gaze on her flushing and paling beauty, he had the helpless sensation of a man who returns at sunrise to find a forest fire raging where he had left a few sticks smouldering at midnight.

"I'm not in love with anybody—you've no right to say so," she returned, "but I'll not have him abused. It's not true, it's not just, it's not generous."

This was too much for his forbearance, though he told himself that, after all, there was no "getting at" Molly from the surface, and that this outburst might conceal a fancy for himself quite as well as for the miller. The last idea, while it tantalized him, was not without a pleasant sting for his senses.

"You're a goose, Molly, and I've half a mind to shake you soundly," he said. "Since there's no other way to cure you of this foolish infatuation, I'll take you down to Old Church to-morrow and let you see with your own eyes. You've forgotten how things look there, that's my opinion."

"Oh, Jonathan," she said, and grew dangerously sweet, while all her soft flushing body leaned toward him. "You are a perfect dear, aren't you?"

"I rather think I am, since you put the question. Molly, will you kiss me?"

She drew back at once, a little deprecating, because she was honestly sorry, since he was so silly as to want to kiss her, that she couldn't oblige him. For her own part, she felt, she wouldn't have cared, but she remembered Abel's anger because of the kiss by the brook, and the thought hardened her heart. It was foolish of men to make so much importance of kisses.

"I'm sorry, but I can't. Don't ask me, Jonathan—all the same you are a darling!"

Then before he could detain her, she had slipped away from him through Kesiah's door, which she closed after her.

"Aunt Kesiah," he heard her exclaim joyously, "Jonathan is going to take me to Old Church to spend to-morrow!"

Kesiah, in an ugly grey dressing-gown, tied at the waist with a black cord, was drying Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator. At Molly's entrance, she turned, and said warningly, "Patsey is rubbing Angela after her bath. What was that about Old Church, dear?"

"Jonathan has promised to take me down there to-morrow."

"To spend the day? Well, I suppose we may trust you with him." From her manner one might have inferred that the idea of not trusting anybody with Jonathan would have been a joke.

She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator, as if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall, her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque, and sexless. But Molly was in the mood when the need to talk—to let oneself go—is so great that the choice of a listener is little more than an accident. She had discovered at last—discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate—the meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of the last few months. Before she could understand what Abel had meant to her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them. It was like looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the space it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and the intoxication of magic was upon her. She had passed within the Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes.

"Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly, and her voice thrilled, "were you ever in love?"

Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expression of a person who has been interrupted in the serious business of life by the fluttering of a humming-bird. It required an effort for her to recede from the comfortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than the satisfactions of the body. Only for a few weeks in the spring did she relapse periodically into such a condition of mind.

"Never," she answered.

"Did you never feel that you cared about anybody—in that way?"

"Never."

It was incredible! It was appalling! But it really had happened! Love, which filled the world, was not the beginning and the end, as it ought to be, of every mortal existence. Subtract it from the universe and there was nothing left but a void, yet in this void, life seemed to move and feed and have its being just as if it were really alive. People indeed—even women—would go on, like Kesiah, for almost sixty years, and not share, for an instant, the divine impulse of creation. They could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them. They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence—this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory of the universe!

Then Kesiah turned suddenly from the radiator, and there was an expression in her face which reminded Molly of the old lady with the bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria she had seen on the train—an expression of useless knowledge and regret, as though she realized that she had missed the essential thing and that it was life, after all, that had been to blame for it. For a minute only the look lasted, for Kesiah's was a closed soul, and the smallest revelation of herself was like the agony of travail.

"If you don't mind, dear, will you carry these sheets to Patsey for Angela's bed," she said.

At the time Gay had been only half in earnest when he promised to take Molly to Old Church, and he presented himself at breakfast next morning with the unspoken hope in his heart that she had changed her mind during the night. When she met him with her hat on, he inquired facetiously if she contemplated a journey, and proceeded to make light of her response that the carriage was ordered to take them to the station.

"But we'll starve if we go there," he urged, "the servants are scattered, and the luncheon I got last time was a subject for bad language."

"I'll cook you one, Jonathan. I can cook beautifully," she said.

The idea amused him. After all they could easily get back to dinner.

"I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, Molly?" he asked, smiling, and she saw that she had won. Winning was just as easy with Jonathan as it had been with Reuben or with Abel.

It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian summer. When they left the train and drove along the corduroy road from Applegate, the forest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and copper. Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze. The few belated yellow butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift pensively in the autumnal stillness.

On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for Gay was occupied with the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was thinking that but for Reuben's death, she would never have accepted Mr. Jonathan's legacy and parted from Abel.

"All this happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk and not across the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that, Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have quarrelled." It was such a little thing—only the eighth of a mile which had decided her future. She might just as easily have turned aside if she had only suspected. But life was like that—you never suspected until things had happened, and the little decisions, made in the midst of your ignorance, committed you to your destiny.

The horses came out of the wood, plodding over the sandy soil, which marked the beginning of the open country. Across the fields toward Bottom's Ordinary, scattered groups of people were walking in twos and threes, showing like disfiguring patches in the midst of the golden rod and the life-everlasting. Old Adam, hobbling up the path, while the horses stopped to drink at the well, touched his hat as he steadied himself with the aid of his big knotted stick.

"It's a fine sight to see you back among us," he said. "If you'd come a couple of hours earlier you'd have been in time for the wedding?"

"What wedding?" asked Gay in a clear voice, but moved by some intuitive knowledge of what the answer would be, he did not look at Molly.

"Why, Solomon Hatch's daughter, Judy, to be sure. She's just married the miller." For a minute he stopped, coughed, spat and then added: "Mr. Mullen tied 'em up tight all by heart, without so much as glancin' at the book. Ah, that young parson may have his faults, an' be unsound on the doctrine of baptism, but he can lay on matrimony with as pious an air as if he was conductin' a funeral."

He fell back as Gay nodded pleasantly, and the wheels grated over the rocky ground by the well. With a slow flick on the long whip, the carriage crossed the three roads and rolled rapidly into the turnpike. And while she gazed straight ahead into the flat distance, Molly was thinking, "All this has happened because I went down the Haunt's Walk that April afternoon and not over the east meadow."



CHAPTER VII

A NEW BEGINNING TO AN OLD TRAGEDY

The wedding was over. Mr. Mullen had read the service in his melodious voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as though he saw a vision in the sunbeam above Judy's head. On that solitary occasion his soul, which revolted from what he described in secret as the "Methodistical low church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple word with the facial solemnity that accompanies an elaborate ritual.

From the front pew, Sarah Revercomb, in full widow's weeds, had glared stonily at the Reverend Orlando, as if she suspected him of some sinister intention to tamper with the ceremony. At her side, Solomon Hatch's little pointed beard might have been seen rising and falling as it followed the rhythmic sound of the clergyman's voice. When the service was over, and the congregation filed out into the leaf-strewn paths of the churchyard, it was generally decided that Mr. Mullen's delivery had never been surpassed in the memory of the several denominations.

"'Twas when he came to makin' Abel say 'with all my worldly goods' that he looked his grandest," commented old Adam, as he started for Solomon's cottage between Sarah and Mrs. Hatch. "But, them are solemn words an' he was wise to give a man pause for thought. Thar ain't a mo' inspirin' sentence in the whole Prayer-book than that."

"Well, marriage ain't all promisin'," observed Sarah, "thar's a deal to it besides, an' they're both likely to find it out befo' they're much older."

Old Adam, who never contradicted a woman unless he was married to her, agreed to this with some unintelligible mutters through his toothless gums, while Mrs. Hatch remarked with effusive amiability that "it's a sad sight to see a daughter go, even though she's a stepchild. It's a comfort to think," she added immediately, "that Judy's got a God-fearin', pious husband an' one with no nonsense about him for all his good looks."

"I ain't so sure about the nonsense," retorted Sarah, "Abel's got to be managed like all men folk, an' he ain't so different from the rest of 'em, unless it is that he's mo' set."

She harboured a carefully concealed opinion that Abel was "stooping" to marry Judy, for the Hatches were particularly thriftless and had never succeeded in paying a long standing mortgage. Besides, they were in the habit of using their parlour commonly on week days, and Mrs. Hatch had once been seen at church in a calico dress—though, it was true, she had slipped out of the side door before the service was over. Added to these things, Sarah had observed of late that Judy showed an inclination to shirk her duties, and had a dangerous habit of "mooning" while she was at the wash tub.

"Well, I like a man that's set, myself," rejoined Mrs. Hatch, as effusive as ever. "I used to say thar never was anybody so set as my first husband till I got my second."

"I ain't had so wide an experience as you," replied Sarah, as if she were condescending to an acknowledged lapse in virtue. "Thar's a difference between marryin' for the sake of matrimony, which is right an' proper accordin' to Scripture, an' marryin' for the sake of a man, which is a sign of weakness in a woman."

"You ain't a friend to the feelin's of natur, ma'am," remarked old Adam, with respect.

"No, thar never was much natur in me," responded Sarah, lifting her bombazine skirt with both hands as she stepped over a puddle. Her floating crape veil, bought ten years after her husband's death, with the money made from her turkeys, represented the single extravagance as well as the solitary ambition of her life. Even as a child she had longed ardently to wear crape, and this secret aspiration, which had smouldered in the early poverty-stricken years of her marriage, had burst suddenly into flame when she found herself a widow. During the burial service over her husband, while she had sat bowed in musty black cotton, which had been loaned her by a neighbour, she had vowed earnestly that she would wear weeds yet for Abner before she died. Ten years of scraping and saving were devoted to this sacred resolve, and now, twenty years after the death of Abner Revercomb, she was wearing a crape veil for him to his son's wedding. As she walked, so strong a smell of camphor floated from her garments, that old Adam sneezed twice, and then muttered hurriedly that "'twas the very season for chills." Something of her secret pride in her garb of mourning had entered into him while he limped beside her on his rheumatic old legs.

Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the Solomon's cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride. Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic, that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she rolled over for an airing. Not a speck of dust was left on the floor or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets, without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life. Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies, the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato.

Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork. "Thar's something wantin'," she observed presently to herself. "I never could feel that a weddin' or a funeral was finished without a calla lily somewhere around." Going downstairs to the kitchen, she clipped the last forced blossoms of an unusual size from her "prize" plant, and brought them back in a small glass vase to decorate Judy's bureau. "Now it's just like it was when I was married," she thought, "an' it's just as it will be when Abel's sons are bringin' home their brides." There was no sentiment in her thoughts, for she regarded sentiment as a mere morbid stimulant to the kind of emotion she considered both dangerous and useless. Even the look on Abel's face, which she had been forced to recognize as that of despair, seemed to her, on the whole, a safer expression than one of a too-exultant joy. She was not afraid of despair—its manifestations were familiar to her, and she had usually found them amenable to the laws of propriety. But she felt vaguely that happiness in some mysterious way was related to sin, and the shameless ecstasy with which Abel had announced his engagement to Molly had branded his emotion as positively immoral in her sight. "No decent feelin' is goin' to make anybody's face shine like a brass plate," she had said to herself.

After straightening the crocheted mats for the last time, she went downstairs to the kitchen to describe the wedding to the two old people, who, chained to their chairs by rheumatism, were on the point of bursting with curiosity.

"An' you didn't bring me so much as a bite of cake," whimpered grandmother, seeing her empty hands. "Here I've been settin' all day in this cheer with my mouth waterin' for that weddin' cake."

"I'm just as sure as I can be that Mrs. Hatch is goin' to send you some made by Blossom," replied Sarah soothingly.

"Ah, to think of Abel bein' at his own weddin' an' we settin' here," piped grandfather. "'Twas a hasty business, but we Revercombs were al'ays the folk to swallow our puddin' while 'twas smokin' an' then cry out that we didn't know 'twas hot. I never knew one of us that didn't have to larn he was a fool befo' he could come at any wisdom."

"Well, I ain't got anything particular against the girl," said Sarah, "but it's my bounden belief that she'll turn out a slattern. Thar's something moonstruck about her—you can tell it by that shiftin' skeered-rabbit look in her eyes. She's just the sort to sweep all the trash under the bed an' think she's cleaned the room."

"It's amazin', the small sense men have in sech matters," remarked grandfather. "Thar's a feelin' among us, I don't know whar it comes from, that the little and squinched-up women generally run to virtue."

"Oh, I ain't sayin' she's not a good girl accordin' to her lights," returned Sarah, "an', after all, it ain't a man but his mother that suffers from a slattern. Well, I must go an' lay off my weeds befo' it's time for 'em to get here. Don't you fret, ma, Mrs. Hatch is surely goin' to send you something."

Inspired by this prophecy, grandmother began immediately to show signs of reviving hope, and a little later, when the sound of wheels was heard on the road, she was seized with an anticipation so violent that she fluttered like a withered leaf in the wind. Then the wheels stopped at the gate, and Blossom and Mr. Mullen entered, bearing a small basket, which contained disordered remains of the wedding feast.

"Whar's Abel?" inquired Sarah, bowing stiffly to the young clergyman.

"We passed them in the road. My horse for once outstripped his mare," replied Mr. Mullen, who felt a crawling sensation in the back of his neck whenever Sarah was present, as if he were called upon to face in her single person an entire parsimonious vestry. "I had the pleasure of driving your granddaughter home, and now I must be going back to bring mother. It was a delightful occasion, Mrs. Revercomb, and you are to be congratulated on the charming addition to your family." He hadn't meant to use the word "charming"—he had intended to say "estimable" instead—but Sarah embarrassed him by her expression, and it slipped out before he was aware of it. Her manner annoyed him excessively. It was as bad as looking up suddenly in the midst of one of the finest paragraphs in his sermon and meeting a supercilious look on a face in his congregation.

"Humph!" observed Sarah shortly, and when he had gone, she emitted the sound again, half to herself, half to her audience, "humph!"

"What's the matter, grandma?" inquired Blossom listlessly, "you don't look as if you were pleased."

"Oh, I'm pleased," replied Sarah curtly. "I'm pleased. Did you notice how yellow Abel was lookin' at the weddin'? What he needs is a good dose of castor oil. I've seen him like that befo', an' I know."

"Oh, grandma! how can you? who ever heard of anybody taking castor oil on their wedding day?"

"Well, thar's a lot of 'em that would better," rejoined Sarah in her tart manner. The perfection of Mr. Mullen's behaviour in church combined with her forgetfulness to make up the feather bed had destroyed her day, and her irritation expressed itself as usual in a moral revolt from her surroundings. "To think of makin' all this fuss about that pop-eyed Judy Hatch," she thought, and a minute later she said aloud, "Thar they are now; Blossom, you take Judy upstairs to her room an' I'll see after Abel. It ain't any use contradictin' me. He's in for a bilious spell just as sure as you are born." She spoke irritably, for her anxiety about Abel's liver covered a deeper disquietude, and she was battling with all the obstinacy of the Hawtreys against the acknowledgment that the ailment she was preparing to dose with drugs was a simple malady of the soul. In her moral universe, sin and virtue were two separate entities, as easily distinguished on the surface as any other phenomena. That a mere feeling, not produced by a disordered liver, could make a man wear that drawn and desperate look in his face, appeared to her both unnatural and reprehensible.

But Abel did not appear, though Sarah awaited his entrance with a bottle in her hand. As soon as he had turned his mare out to pasture, he crossed the road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel, watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead. He knew how a man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in a moment of madness. Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him—why he had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding—he could no more explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the absurdities in a nightmare. It was all a part of the terrible and yet useful perversity of life—of the perversity that enables a human being to pass from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his course to reflect on his folly.

In front of him was the vivid green rise in the meadow, which showed like a burst of spring in the midst of the November landscape. Beyond it, the pines were etched in sharp outlines on the bright blue sky, where a buzzard was sailing slowly in search of food. The weather was so perfect that the colours of the fields and the sky borrowed the intense and unreal look of objects seen in a crystal.

"Well, it's over and done," said Abel to himself; "it's over and done and I'm glad of it." It seemed to him while he spoke that it was his life, not his marriage, to which he alluded—that he had taken the final, the irremediable step, and there was nothing to come afterwards. The uncertainty and the suspense were at an end, for the clanging of the prison doors behind him was still in his ears. To-morrow would be like yesterday, the next year would be like the last. Forgetting his political ambition, he told himself passionately that there was nothing ahead of him—nothing to look forward to. Vaguely he realized that inconsistent and irreconcilable as his actions appeared, they had been, in fact, held together by a single, connecting thread, that one dominant feeling had inspired all of his motives. If he had never loved Molly, he saw clearly now, he should never have rushed into his marriage with Judy. Pity had driven him first in the direction of love—he remembered the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken Janet—and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his marriage. All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.

"Poor Judy," he said aloud after a minute, "she deserves to be happy and I'm going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so."

And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer to his resolve, a memory of the past so vivid that it seemed to exist not only in his thoughts, but in the radiant autumn fields at which he was looking. All the old passionate sweetness, as sharp as pain, appeared to float there in the Indian summer before him. Rapture or agony? He could not tell, but he knew that he had lost it forever.

Turning away, he recrossed the log, and stood for a moment, hesitating, with his hand on the gate. A decrepit figure, hobbling with bent head through a golden cloud of dust, signed to him to stop, and while he waited, he made out the person of old Adam, slightly the worse, he gathered, for the wedding feast.

"I tarried thar till the last, hopin' to have still another taste of toddy," remarked the aged merrymaker. "When a man has turned ninety he might as well cease to take thought for his morals, an' let the natchel bent of 'em have a chance."

It was plain that his last glass had been too much for him, and that, for the first time in his temperate career, he was rapidly approaching a condition of alcoholic ecstasy.

"You'd better go home and take a nap," said Abel kindly. "You can't very well get lost between here and your house, or I'd go with you."

"It warn't the weddin' glass that was too much for me," replied the old man at the point of tears, "'twas the one I had arterwards at the or'nary. Not wishin' to depart from an old custom on account of a rare festival, I stopped at Mrs. Bottom's just as young Mr. Jonathan an' Reuben Merryweather's gal drove up from Applegate. Ah, sech a sight as she was—all in shot silk that rustled when you looked at it—an' as pretty as a pictur."

"So they've come back?" asked Abel, almost in a whisper.

"Yes, they've come back, an' a sad comin' it was for her, as I could see in her face. 'What are you wearin' yo' Sunday best for, Mr. Doolittle?' asked Mr. Jonathan, spry as a cricket. 'It's a fine weddin' I've been to, Mr. Jonathan,' I answered, 'an' I've seen two lovin' hearts beatin' as one befo' Mr. Mullen at the altar.' Then Reuben Merryweather's gal called out right quickly, 'Whose weddin', old Adam?' an' when I replied, 'Abel Revercomb's,' as I was bound to, her face went as white as a han't right thar befo' me—-"

"You'd better go home or you won't be in any condition to walk there," said Abel angrily. "It's down right indecent to see a man of your age rocking about in the road."

Turning quickly in his tracks, he went over the log again and on to the loneliness of the meadows beyond.

"And she went as white as a haunt," he muttered under his breath.



CHAPTER VIII

A GREAT PASSION IN A HUMBLE PLACE

Time does not stand still even for the unhappily married. A man may have wedded the wrong woman, but he comes down to his breakfast and goes about his work as punctually as if he had wedded the right one. To Abel, with the thought of Molly throbbing like a fever in his brain, it was still possible to grind his grist and to subtract carefully the eighth part as a toll—while Judy, hushed in day dreams, went on making butter in a habit of absent-minded tranquillity. Life seldom deals in cataclysmic situations—at least on the surface. Living side by side in a married intimacy for months, Abel and Judy were still strangers to each other. Their bodies touched while their souls were crucified at an immeasurable distance.

To Sarah, who embraced Christian theology while she practised religiously the doctrine of the physical basis of life, there had seemed no cause for disturbance, until Judy entered the kitchen on a stormy evening in June, and turned a pair of inflamed eyes on the face of her mother-in-law. The young woman wore her wedding dress, now nearly seven months old, and clasped in her hand a neatly bound prayer-book which had been the gift of the Reverend Orlando. For more than six months she had suffered silently under Sarah's eyes, which saw only outward and visible afflictions. Now, at the first sign of quivering flesh, the older woman was at once on the alert.

"Whar you goin', Judy?" she inquired. "You ain't thinkin' about traipsin' out of doors on a night like this, are you?"

"Archie promised to take me to the Bible class, an' he hasn't come back," replied Judy, while her face worked convulsively. "I've waited for him since half past seven."

"If that don't beat all!" exclaimed Sarah. "Why, it's thunderin' like Jedgment Day. Can't you hear it?"

"But I promised Mr. Mullen I wouldn't let anything prevent me," returned Judy, growing sullen. "Archie said he'd be back here without fail, an' I know he's stayed to supper over at the Halloweens'."

"Isn't it foolish to wear your best hat out in the rain?" asked Blossom, not without surprise, for her sister-in-law had developed into something of a slattern.

"I reckon hats are made to be worn," retorted Judy. As a rule her temper was placid enough, but Archie's defection, after she had given him her best neck-tie for the purpose of binding him to his promise, had overstrained the tension of her nerves. "Where's Abner? He used to go regular."

"He's gone upstairs so tired that he can barely hist his foot," replied Sarah. "You'd better let that Bible class alone this evening, Judy. Yo' salvation ain't dependin' on it, I reckon."

But in Judy's colourless body there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra. At the moment she would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study of Exodus under the eyes of the rector. In the arid stretch of her existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish. She had made butter all day with the hope of that Bible class in her mind, and she was determined that, whatever it cost the Revercombs, she should have her reward this evening in the commendation of the young clergyman. That mere thunder and lightning should keep her from his side appeared to her little less than absurd. She knew that he had received a call within the week, and she would have walked unshod over burning ploughshares in order to hear him say that he had declined it.

"I've got to go," she insisted stubbornly. "If there isn't anybody to go with me, I'll go alone."

"Why, if you're so bent on it I'll take you myself," said Abel, looking up from the barrel of his gun, which he was cleaning. His manner to Judy was invariably kind and even solicitous, to a degree which caused Sarah to tell herself at times that "it wasn't natural an' wasn't goin' to last." As long as men would behave themselves quietly, and go about their business with the unfailing regularity of the orthodox, she preferred, on the whole, that they should avoid any unusual demonstration of virtue. An extreme of conduct whether good or bad made her uneasy. She didn't like, as she put it in her mind, "anything out of the way." Once when Abel, nettled by some whim of Judy's, had retorted with a slight show of annoyance, his mother had experienced a positive sensation of relief, while she said to herself with a kind of triumph that "the old Adam was thar still."

"You've got that hackin' cough, Abel an' you oughtn't to go out in this storm," remarked Sarah, with an uneasiness she could not conceal.

"Oh, it won't hurt me. I'm a pine knot. Are you ready, Judy?"

"It's such a little way," said Judy, still sullen under her mother-in-law's disapproval. When Abel coughed once, while he was getting into his rubber coat, she glanced at him angrily. Why couldn't he have waited at least until he got out of doors? Instead of gratitude she bore him a dull resentment for having married her, and when she looked back on her hard life in her father's house, she beheld it through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present. Then she had had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle! During the seven months of her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as freedom to be unhappy.

When the door closed behind them Sarah looked at Blossom with an eloquent expression. "Well, I never!" she exclaimed, and wrung the dough from her hands into the tray over which she was standing. "Well I never!"

"I don't believe it's right for Abel to give in to Judy as he does," said Blossom.

"I never saw a Revercomb that warn't a fool about something," answered Sarah. "It don't matter so much what 'tis about, but it's obliged to be about something."

Blossom sighed and bent lower over the seam she was running. She had long since ceased to draw any consolation from her secret marriage, and her wedding ring (bought weeks after the ceremony by Gay) caused her pain rather than pleasure when it pressed into her bosom, where it hung suspended by a blue ribbon from her neck. Her strong Saxon instinct for chastity—for the integrity of feminine virtue—sometimes awoke in her, and then she would think exultingly, "At least I am married!" But even this amazing triumph of morality—of the spirit of Sarah Revercomb over the spirit of the elder Jonathan Gay—showed pallid and bloodless beside the evanescent passion to which she had been sacrificed. Destiny, working through her temperament, had marked her for victory, but it had been only one of those brief victories which herald defeats. The forces of law and order—the sound racial instincts which make for the preservation of society—these had won in the event, though they had been, after all, powerless to change the ultimate issue. The spirit of old Jonathan, as well as the spirit of Sarah, was immortal. The racial battle between the soldier of fortune and the militant Calvinist was not yet fought to a finish.

"I believe Abel would give Judy the clothes on his back if he thought she wanted them," said Blossom, in the effort to turn her musings away from her own troubles.

"It ain't natural," rejoined Sarah stubbornly. "It's a man's natur to be mean about money matters whar his wife is concerned, an' when he begins to be different it's a sign that thar's a screw loose somewhar inside of him. My Abner was sech a spendthrift that he'd throw away a day's market prices down at the or'nary, but he used to expect the money from a parcel of turkeys to keep me in clothes and medicines and doctor's bills, to say nothin' of household linen an' groceries for the whole year round."

Blossom sighed softly, "I don't suppose there ever was a man who could see that a woman needed anything except presents now and then," she said, "unless it's Abel. Do you know, grandma, I sometimes think he's so kind to Judy because he knows he doesn't love her."

"Well, I reckon, if thar's got to be a choice between love and kindness, I'd hold on to kindness," retorted Sarah.

It was ten o'clock before Abel and Judy returned, and from the hurried and agitated manner of their entrance, it was plain that the Bible class had not altogether appeased Judy's temper.

"She's worn out, that's the matter," explained Abel, while they stopped to dry themselves in the kitchen.

"You go straight upstairs to bed, Judy," said Sarah, "an' I'll send you up a cup of gruel by Abel. You oughtn't to have gone streakin' out in this rain, an' it's natural that it should have upset you."

"It wasn't the rain," replied Judy, and the instant afterwards, she burst into tears and ran out of the room before they could stop her.

"I declar', I never saw anybody carry on so in my life," observed Sarah.

Abel glanced at her with a perplexed and anxious frown on his brow. "You ought to be patient with her condition," he said. His own patience was inexhaustible, and its root, as Blossom had suspected, lay in his remorseful indifference. With Molly he had not been patient, but he had loved her.

"Don't talk to me about patience," rejoined Sarah, "haven't I had nine an' lost six?"

She was entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy, and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried on" over her when she had had her nine.

"Have you said anything sharp to her to-day, mother?" he inquired suspiciously, after a minute.

"You know I ain't, Abel. She left a dirty glass in the dairy an' I never so much as mentioned it. Did Mr. Mullen complain of her leavin' off mission work?"

"Why, of course not. He talked to us only a few minutes and he seemed absent-minded. He's had a good call somewhere in the North, and he told us that he had prayed over it unceasingly and he believed that the Lord was directing him to larger fields."

"Did Judy hear that?"

"Yes, he told us both."

Sarah was stirring the gruel, and she appeared so absorbed in her task that the remark she let fall a minute later bore presumably no relation to the conversation.

"I sometimes think men ain't got any mo' sense than an unborn babe!" she observed.

Taking the cup from her hands, Abel went up the little staircase to the bedroom, where Judy stood before the bureau, with a long black-headed hat pin in her hand. She had evidently not begun to undress, for her hat was still on her head, and under the heavy shadow of the brim her eyes looked back at her husband with an accusing and hostile expression.

"Drink this, Judy, while it is hot," he said kindly, placing the cup on the bureau.

"I don't want it," she answered, and her voice sounded as if she were ready to burst again into tears.

"Are you sick?"

"No."

"I'm going to sleep in the attic. Call me if you want anything."

Without replying she took off her hat and placed it on the top shelf in the wardrobe. Had he beaten her she felt that she could almost have loved him, but the primitive sex instinct in her was outraged by his gentleness.

"Has anybody hurt your feelings?" asked Abel, turning suddenly on his way to the door.

"No."

"Then, for God's sake, what is it?" he demanded, at his wit's end. "You look as if you'd lost the last friend you had on earth."

At this she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before they escaped. A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom, and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long, agonized tremors shook her slender figure. Looking at her, he remembered bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy. By the sacrifice of his own inclinations he had achieved this disastrous result. If he had tried to do evil instead of good, he could hardly have wrought more irreparable mischief—and with the thought, pity, which had led him astray, winged off, like an ironic sprite, and left his heart empty of comfort.

"God knows I am sorry for you, Judy," he said in the effort to reinforce his compassion.

But Judy, though she was avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression of it from her husband—for her temperament was of the morbid kind that is happiest when it is most miserable. Her heart had fed upon the sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men—if not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could cut even more deeply. She turned in the direction of sentiment as instinctively as a plant turns toward light, and the Reverend Orlando Mullen had had predecessors in her affections who had been hardly so much as aware of her existence.

As Abel went out of the door, her accusing eyes followed him while she thought, with sentimental regret, of the many things she had given up when she married—of Mrs. Mullen's ironing day, of the rector's darning, of the red flannel petticoats she had no longer time to make for the Hottentots. It was over one of these flannel petticoats that Mr. Mullen had first turned to her with his earnest and sympathetic look, as though he were probing her soul. At the moment she had felt that his casual words held a hidden meaning, and to this day, though she had pondered them in sleepless nights ever since, she was still undecided.

"I don't believe he knew how much I cared," she said, as she started mechanically to take out her hairpins.



CHAPTER IX

A MEETING IN THE PASTURE

As Judy did not appear next morning, her breakfast was carried up to her by Sarah, who allowed her own cakes to become leathery while she arranged the tray. Her feet were still on the staircase, when Blossom turned to Abel and said in a furtive and anxious voice:

"Mrs. Bottom told me yesterday the Gays were coming back to Jordan's Journey. Have you heard anything about it?"

"No, I haven't heard," he answered indifferently, though his pulses throbbed at the words. Rising from the table an instant later, he went out into the yard, where the sunshine filtered softly through June foliage. By the porch a damask rose-bush was in bloom, and the fragrance followed him along the path between the borders of portulaca. At the gate he found a young robin too weak to fly, and lifting it carefully, he returned it to the nest in a pear-tree. Like all young and helpless things, it aroused in him a tenderness which, in some strange way, was akin to pain.

On the crooked sycamore the young leaves fluttered with shirred edges, and beyond the mill and the fallow field, the slender green ribbons of the corn were unfolding. As he gazed at the pines on the horizon, he remembered the day he had swung his axe in joy under their branches, and it seemed to him, while he looked back upon it, that the hour belonged to the distant memories of his boyhood.

"It's over now, and I'm not going to whine about it," he said aloud to his hound. "A plain fool is bad enough, Moses, my boy, but a whining fool is the meanest thing God ever made in man or dog. Because I've lost the thing I wanted most, I've no mind to wallow in the dust—but, oh, Molly, Molly!"

She came to him again, not fair and flitting, but ardent and tender, with her parted red mouth raised to his, and the light and darkness trembling on her face like faint shadows in the wind. And this vision of her, which was so vivid that it shook his heart with a pang of agony, seemed saying to him in words which were not his—which were not words at all, but some subtler communion of sense—"I am to be loved, but never possessed, for, like the essence of desire, I elude forever the conditions of mortality."

A week later, while the thought of her burned like fire in his brain, he met her face to face in the path which led from the blazed pine over the pasture to Jordan's Journey. Had he seen her in time, he would have fled from the meeting, but she appeared without warning as he turned from the turnpike to the bars. Almost before he was aware of it, he was within touch of her and looking into her eyes. She wore her black dress still, and the air of elegance, of strangeness, was even more obvious than when he had met her at Applegate the day before his marriage. Her face had lost a little of its bloom, and there was a look in it which he had never seen there before—a look which was wistful and yet expectant, as though, like old Reuben, she was hoping against knowledge and in despite of disappointment.

"Molly!" he cried, and stopped short, longing to touch her hand and yet with something, which was like conscience in the shape of Judy, restraining him.

"Abel, how little you've changed!" she said.

"Haven't I? Well, you're yourself, too, and yet you're different."

"Different? I suppose you mean I'm wearing better clothes?"

He smiled for the first time. "I wasn't thinking about your clothes. They never seemed to matter."

What he had meant, though he dared not utter the thought aloud, was that she had grown softer and gentler, and was less the Molly of the flashing charm and the defiant challenge.

"Yes, I've changed in a way, of course," she admitted presently, "I feel grown up now, and I never felt so before. Life was all play to me until grandfather died."

"And it isn't now?"

"Not entirely—I'm still growing."

Her hand rested on the bars beside which she was standing, and the fragrant festoons of wild grape blooming beside the post, brushed softly against her bosom. There was a quietness, a suggestion of restraint in her attitude which he had never seen in the old Molly.

"The day you went away you told me you wanted to live," he said.

"I remember. I couldn't have done differently. I had to find out things for myself. Of course, life is all just the same everywhere, but then I didn't know it. I used to think that one had only to travel a certain distance and one would pass the boundary of the commonplace and come into the country of adventure. It was silly, of course, but you see I didn't know any better. It was the fret of youth, I suppose, though people never seem to think that women ever feel it—or, perhaps, as Mrs. Bottom used to say, it was only the Gay blood working off."

"I don't like to hear you talk of the Gay blood in you," he said quickly.

His voice betrayed him, and looking up, she asked quietly, "How is Judy, Abel?"

"She's not well. It seems she suffers with her nerves."

"I'm coming to see her. Judy and I were always friends, you know."

"Yes, I know. You were a friend to every woman."

"And I am still. I've grown to love Aunt Kesiah, and I believe I'm the only person who sees just how fine she is."

"Your grandfather saw, I think. Do you remember he used to say life was always ready to teach us things, but that some of us were so mortal slow we never learned till we died?"

Her eyes were starry as she looked away from him over the meadow. "Abel, I miss him so," she said after a minute.

"I know, Molly, I know."

"Nothing makes up for him. All the rest seems so distant and unhuman. Nothing is so real to me as the memory of him sitting in his chair on the porch with Spot at his feet."

For a minute he did not reply, and when he spoke at last, it was only to say:

"I wonder if a single human being could ever understand you, Molly?"

"I don't understand myself. I don't even try."

"You've had everything you could want for a year—been everywhere—seen everything—yet, I believe, you'd give it all up to be back in the cottage over there with Reuben and his hound?"

"Why shouldn't I?" she answered passionately, "that was what I loved."

"I suppose you're right," he said a little sadly, "that was always what you loved."

She turned her head away, but he saw the delicate flush pass from her cheek to her throat.

"I mean I am faithful to the things that really matter," she answered.

"And the things that do not really matter are men?" he asked with a humour in which there was a touch of grimness.

"Perhaps you're right about some of them, at least," she answered, smiling at a memory. "I was full of animal spirits—of the joy of energy, and there was no other outlet. A girl sows her mental wild oats, if she has any mind, just as a boy does. But what people never seem to realize is that women go on and change just as men do. They seem to think that a girl stands perfectly still, that what she is at twenty, she remains to the end of her life. Of course that's absurd. After the first shock of real experience that old make-believe side of things lost all attraction for me. I could no more go back to flirting with Mr. Mullen or with Jim Halloween than I could sit down in the road and make mud pies for an amusement. How is Mr. Mullen, by the way?" she inquired in a less serious tone.

"Just the same. He's had a call."

"And old Adam? Is he still living?"

"He can't walk any longer, but his mind is perfectly clear. Sometimes his son puts his chair into an oxcart and brings him over to the ordinary. He's still the best talker about here, and he frets if he is left by himself."

For a moment they were silent again. Old Adam, having fulfilled his purpose, was dismissed into space. Molly watched Abel's eyes turn to the pines on the horizon, and in the midst of the June meadow, there was a look in them that reminded her of the autumnal sadness of nature. She had seen this look in Reuben's face when he gazed wistfully at the blossoming apple boughs in the spring, and the thought came to her that just this attitude of soul—this steadfast courage in the face of circumstance—was the thing that life was meant to teach them both at the end. If Abel's energy was now less effervescent, she realized instinctively that it had become more assured. Life or marriage—or, perhaps, both together had "tamed" him, as Reuben had prophesied, and the rough edges of his character had worn smooth in the process.

A butterfly, marked gorgeously in blue and orange, alighted on the bar by her hand, and when it fluttered off again, drunken with summer, her gaze followed it into the meadow, where the music of innumerable bees filled the sunshine.

"And you, Abel?" she asked, turning presently, "what of yourself?"

He smiled at her before answering; and with the smile, she felt again the old physical joy in his presence—in his splendid animal vitality, in the red-brown colour of his flesh, in the glow of his dark eyes, which smiled down into hers. No other man had ever made this appeal to her senses. She had struggled sometimes like a bird in a net against the memory of it, yet it had held her, in spite of her will, even when she was farthest away from him. The gentleness from which Judy revolted, brought Molly's heart back to him with a longing to comfort.

"Well, I'm learning," he answered, still smiling.

"And you are happy?"

He made a gesture of assent, while he looked over her head at the butterfly—which had found its mate and was soaring heavenward in a flight of ecstasy. The same loyalty which had prevented his touching her hand when they met, rebelled now against an implied reflection on Judy.

"I am glad," she said, "you deserve it."

She had given her eyes to him almost unconsciously, and their look was like a cord which drew them slowly to each other. His pulses hammered in his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the present, crowned, radiant, and sweet to the senses as the garlands of wild grape around which the golden bees hung in a cloud. For an instant only the vision held him; then the rush of desire faded slowly, and some unconquerable instinct, of which he had been almost unconscious, asserted its supremacy in his brain. The ghosts of dead ancestors who had adhered to law at the cost of happiness; the iron skeleton of an outgrown and yet indelibly implanted creed; the tenacity of the racial structure against which his individual impulses had rebelled—these things, or one of these things, proved in the end stronger than the appeal of his passion. He longed with all his strength to hold her in his arms—every nerve in his body ached for her—yet he knew that because of this unconquerable instinct he was powerless to follow his longing.

"I don't think I deserve much, Molly," he said quietly.

She hesitated still, looking away from him in the direction of her path, which led over the meadow.

"Abel, be good to Judy," she said, without turning.

"I will, Molly, I promise you."

He moved a step toward the turnpike, stopped, and looked back.

"I can't do much for you, Molly," he said, "but if you ever need anybody to die for you, remember I'm ready."

"I'll remember," she answered, with a smile, but her eyes were misty when she passed the blazed pine and turned into the little path.



CHAPTER X

TANGLED THREADS

In front of Molly, the path, deep in silvery orchard grass, wound through the pasture to the witch-hazel thicket at Jordan's Journey; and when she entered the shelter of the trees, Gay came, whistling, toward her from the direction of the Poplar Spring. He walked rapidly, and his face wore an anxious and harassed expression, for he was making the unpleasant discovery that even stolen sweets may become cloying to a surfeited palate. His passion had run its inevitable course of desire, fulfilment, and exhaustion. So closely had it followed the changing seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed in the Haunt's Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn. He was conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love for Blossom was over. There was no regret in his mind for the poignant sweetness of the days before he had married her—for the restlessness, the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense—nor even for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment. He did not suffer to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never compensated for the pang of it. Her failures now merely made his manufactured excuses the easier. Once, when she had not been able to come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting of a long strain of anxiety. She still pressed for an acknowledgment of their marriage, while his refusal was still based on a very real solicitude for his mother. Only in the last six months had his feeling for Molly entered into the situation; but like all swift and unguarded emotions, it absorbed the colour in his thoughts, while it left both the past and the future in the cover of darkness.