"I wish you wouldn't wander off alone like this, Molly," he began as he joined her.

"Oh, it's perfectly safe, Jonathan—everybody knows me for miles around."

"But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it. She has never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself."

"Poor Aunt Kesiah," said Molly softly.

He glanced at her sharply. "Why do you say that?" he asked, "she has always seemed to me to have everything she wanted. If she hadn't had mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?"

"I wonder?" she returned; "but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?"

"Well, rather. What are you driving at?"

Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words, appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated Kesiah's generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen whose infinite variety he could not exhaust. The mere recollection of the others wearied him. Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an allurement to his senses. The idea that this might be love, after all, had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that "he hadn't it in him." Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him over the jewelled landscape, and the heavens had opened. Once more the unattainable had appeared to him wrapped in the myriad-coloured veil of his young illusions.

"Molly," he said almost in spite of himself, "what would have happened to us if we had met five or six years ago?"

"Nothing, probably."

"Well, I'm not so sure—not if you like me half as well as I like you. You understand, don't you, that I got myself tied up—entangled before I knew you—but, by Jove, if I were free I'd make you think twice about me."

"There's no use talking about what might have been, is there?"

The hint of his "entanglement," she had accepted quite simply as a veiled allusion to an incident in his life abroad. Her interest in it would have been keener had she been less indifferent to him as a lover, but while she walked by his side, smiling in response to his words, she was thinking breathlessly, like one hushed in suspense, "If Abel had only been like that a year ago, I should not have left him." That the qualities she had always missed in the miller had developed only through the loss of her, she refused to admit. A swift, an almost miraculous change had passed over her, and all the warm blood in her body seemed to rush back to her heart, giving it the abundance of life. The world appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy places of the Haunt's Walk. "Yes, if he had been like that I should never have left him and all this would not have happened," she thought again; "and if I had been like this would he ever have quarrelled with me?" she asked herself the instant afterwards.

And Gay, walking at her side, but separated by a mental universe, was thinking resentfully, "The deuce of it is that it might just as well never have happened! If I'd only been a little less of a fool—If I'd only not walked my horse across the pasture that October afternoon—If I'd only had sense enough to see what was coming—If I'd only—oh, hang it!"

"I'd be a better man to-day if I'd known you sooner, Molly," he said presently. "A man couldn't tire of you because you're never the same thing two days in succession."

"Doesn't a man tire of change?"

"I don't—it's the most blessed thing in life. I wonder why you've given up flirting?"

"Perhaps because there isn't anybody to flirt with."

"I like that. Am I not continually at your service?"

"But I don't like your kind of flirting, somehow."

"What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens. Have you seen him, by the way?"

"He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the Bible. I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch."

"And the miller?"

She was walking beside a clump of lilies, and the colour of the flowers flamed in her face.

"I saw him for a few minutes this morning."

"How has his marriage turned out?"

"I haven't heard. Like all the others, I suppose."

"Well he's as fine a looking animal as one often encounters. His wife is that thin, drawn out, anaemic girl I saw at Piping Tree, isn't she? Such men always seem to marry such women."

"I never thought Judy unattractive. She's really interesting if you take the trouble to dig deep enough."

"I suppose Revercomb dug, but it isn't as a rule a man's habit to go around with a spade when he's in want of a wife."

With an impetuous movement, he bent closer to her:

"Look here, Molly, don't you think you might kiss me?"

"I told you the first time I ever saw you that I didn't care for kissing."

"Well, even if you don't care, can't you occasionally be generous? You've got a colour in your cheeks like red flowers."

"Oh, have I?"

"The trouble is, I've gone and fallen in love with you and it's turning my head."

"I don't think it will hurt you, Jonathan."

She broke away from him before he could detain her, and while a protest was still on his lips, ran up the walk and under the grape arbour into the back door of the house.

Left to himself, Gay wheeled about and passed into the side-garden, where he found Kesiah snipping off withered roses with a pair of pruning shears.

At his approach, she paused in her task and stood waiting for him, with the expression of interested, if automatic, attention, which appeared on her face, as in answer to some secret spring, whenever she was invited to perform the delicate part of a listener. She had attained at last that battered yet smiling acquiescence in the will of Providence which has been eloquently praised, under different names, by both theologians and philosophers. From a long and uncomplaining submission to boredom, she had arrived at a point of blessedness where she was unable to be bored at all. Out of the furnace of a too ardent youth, her soul had escaped into the agreeable, if foggy, atmosphere of middle age. Peace had been provided for her—if not by generously presenting her with the things that she desired, still quite as effectually by crippling the energy of her desires, until they were content to sun themselves quietly in a row, like aged, enfeebled paupers along the south wall of the poorhouse.

"Aunt Kesiah," said Gay, stopping beside her, "do you think any of us understand Molly's character? Is she happy with us or not?"

It is a pleasant thing to be at the time of life, and in the possession of the outward advantages, which compel other persons to stop in the midst of their own interesting affairs and begin to inquire if they understand one's character. As Kesiah lifted a caterpillar on a leaf, and carefully laid it in the centre of the grassy walk, she thought quite cheerfully that nobody had ever wondered about her character, and that it must be rather nice to have some one do so.

"I don't know, Jonathan; you will tread on that caterpillar if you aren't careful."

"Hang the caterpillar! I sometimes suspect that she isn't quite so happy as she ought to be."

"She didn't get over Reuben's death easily, if that is what you mean."

"I don't know whether it is what I mean or not."

"Perhaps her development has surprised you, in a way. The first touch of sorrow changed her from a child into a woman. No one ever realized, I suppose, the strength that was in her all the time."

Turning away from her, he stared moodily at Uncle Boaz, who was trimming the lawn beyond the miniature box hedges of the garden. Furrows of mown grass lay like golden green wind-drifts behind the swinging passage of the scythe, and the face of the old negro showed scarred and wistful under the dappled sunshine. June beetles, coloured like emeralds, spun loudly through the stillness, which had in it an almost human quality of hushed and expectant waiting. All Nature seemed to be breathing softly, lest she should awake from her illusion and find the world dissolved into space.

"I wonder if it is really the miller?" said Gay suddenly. "The truth is her life seems empty of something."

"I beg your pardon?" returned Kesiah, startled, for she had been thinking not of Molly's life, but of her own. It was not much of a life, to be sure, but it was all she had, so she felt it was only natural that she should think about it.

"I said I wondered if it were the miller," repeated Gay a little impatiently. Like his mother he found Kesiah's attacks of inattention very trying—and if she were to get deaf the only position she had ever filled with credit would be necessarily closed to her. What on earth did she have to occupy her anyway if not other people's affairs?

"I can hardly believe that," she answered. "Of course he's a very admirable young man, but it's out of the question that Molly should worry her mind about him after he has gone and married another woman."

Her logic seemed rather feeble to Gay, but as he had told himself often before, Kesiah never could argue.

"I hear the fellow's come out quite surprisingly. Mr. Chamberlayne tells me he is speaking now around the neighbourhood, and he has a pretty command of rough and ready oratory."

"I suppose that is why Molly is so anxious to hear him. She has ordered her horse to ride over to a meeting at Piping Tree this afternoon."

"What?" He stared in amazement.

"Young Revercomb is going to speak at an open air meeting of some kind—political, I imagine—and Molly is going to hear him."

His answer was a low whistle. "At what time?" he asked presently.

"She ordered her horse at three—the very hottest part of the day."

"Well, she'll probably have sunstroke," Gay replied, "but at any rate, I'll not let her have it alone."



CHAPTER XI

THE RIDE TO PIPING TREE

A look of surprise came into Molly's face when she found Gay waiting for her, but it passed quickly, and she allowed him to mount her without a word of protest or inquiry. She had been a good rider ever since the days when she galloped bareback on Reuben's plough horses to the pasture, and Gay's eyes warmed to her as she rode ahead of him down the circular drive, checkered with sunlight. Yet in spite of her prettiness, which he had never dignified by the name of beauty, he knew that it was no superficial accident of colour or of feature that had first caught his fancy and finally ripened his casual interest into love. The charm was deeper still, and resulted from something far subtler than the attraction of her girlish freshness—from something vivid yet soft in her look, which seemed to burn always with a tempered warmth. For need of a better word he called this something her "soul," though he knew that he meant, in reality, certain latent possibilities of passion which appeared at moments to pervade not only her sensitive features, but her whole body with a flamelike glow and mobility. While he watched her he remembered his meeting with Blossom, and the marriage to which in some perfectly inexplicable manner it had led him, but it was not in his power, even if he had willed it, to conjure up the violence of past emotions as he could summon back the outlines of the landscape which had served as their objective background.

"Molly," he said, riding closer to her as they passed into the turnpike, "I wish I knew why we are going on this wild goose chase after the miller?"

"I'm not going after him—it's only that I want to hear him speak. I don't see why that should surprise you."

"I didn't know that you were interested in politics?"

"I'm not—in politics."

"In the miller then?"

"Why shouldn't I be interested in him? I've known him all my life."

"The fact remains that you're in a different position now and can't afford a free rein to your sportive fancies."

"He'd be the last to admit what you say about position—if you mean class. He doesn't believe in any such thing, nor do I."

"Money, my dear, is the only solid barrier—but he's got a wife, anyway."

"Judy and I are friends. That's another reason for my wanting to hear him."

"But to ride six miles at three o'clock on a scorching day to listen to a stump speech by a rustic agitator, seems to me a bit ridiculous."

"There was no reason for your coming, Jonathan. I didn't ask you."

"I accept the reproof, and I am silent—but I can't resist returning it by telling you that you need a man's strong hand as much as any woman I ever saw."

"I don't need yours anyway."

"By Jove, that's just whose, my pretty. You needn't think that because I haven't made you love me, I couldn't."

"I doubt it very much—but you may think so if you choose."

"Suppose I were to dress in corduroy and run a grist mill."

Her laugh came readily.

"You're too fat!"

"Another thrust like that, and I'll gallop off and leave you."

His face was bent toward hers, and it was only the quick change in her expression, and the restive start of her horse, that made him swerve suddenly aside and glance at the blazed pine they were passing. Leaning against the tree, with her arms resting on the bars, and her body as still as if it were chiselled out of stone, Blossom Revercomb was watching them over a row of tall tiger lilies. Her features were drawn and pallid, as if from sharp physical pain, and a blight had spread over her beauty, like the decay of a flower that feeds a canker at its heart.

With an exclamation of alarm, Molly turned her horse's head in the direction of the pine, but with a hasty yet courteous gesture, Gay rode quickly ahead of her, and leaning from his saddle spoke a few words in an undertone. The next instant Blossom had fled and the two were riding on again down the turnpike.

"She looked so unhappy, Jonathan. I wonder what was the matter?"

"She was tired, probably." He despised himself for the evasion, for his character was naturally an open one, and he heartily disliked all subterfuge. Yet he implied the falsehood even while he hated the necessity which forced him to it. So all his life he had done the things that he condemned, condemning himself because he did them. For more than a year now he had lived above a continuous undercurrent of subterfuge—he had lied to Blossom, he had deceived his mother, he had wilfully encouraged Molly to believe a falsehood—and yet all the time, he was conscious that his nature preferred the honourable and the candid course. His intentions were still honest, but long ago in his boyhood, when he had first committed himself to impulse, he had prepared the way for his subsequent failures. To-day, with a weakened will, with an ever increasing sensitiveness of his nervous system, he knew that he should go on desiring the good while he compromised with the pleasanter aspect of evil.

"She wouldn't speak to me," said Molly, "I can't understand it. What did you say to her?"

"I asked her if she were ill and if we could do anything for her."

"I can't get over her look. I wish I had jumped down and run after her, but she went off so quickly."

So intense was the sunshine that it appeared to burn into the white streak of the road, where the dust floated like some smoke on the breathless air. From the scorched hedges of sumach and bramble, a chorus of grasshoppers was cheerfully giving praise to a universe that ignored it.

As Molly rode silently at Gay's side, it seemed to her that Blossom's startled face looked back at her from the long, hot road, from the waste of broomsedge, from the cloudless sky, so bright that it hurt her eyes. It was always there wherever she turned: she could not escape it. A sense of suffocation in the midst of space choked back the words she would have spoken, and she felt that the burning dust, which hung low over the road, had drifted into her brain and obscured her thoughts as it obscured the objects around her. When, after passing the ordinary, they turned into the Applegate road, the heavy shade brought a sensation of relief, and the face which had seemed to start out of the blanched fields, faded slowly away from her.

As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear Abel's speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.

"I don't believe I'll stay, after all, Jonathan," she said weakly. "It's so hot and I don't really want to hear him."

"But we're here now, Molly, and he's already begun." Against the feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the trouble. "It's over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he pursued. "Come on. We needn't dismount if you don't feel like it—but I've a curiosity to know what he's talking about."

Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing the miller. Abel's ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the higher to the lower classes. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the miller's raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest and tolerant amusement.

"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we'll stop by the fence under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us."

As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then slowly followed. In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not separate the sound of Abel's voice from the confusion around her. Then his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform, which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere. Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed the one masculine and dominating intelligence. To Molly he represented neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt rather than heard. What he said she was hardly aware of—for it was emotion not thought that he aroused in her.

"That's good!" said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment of the economic upheaval of society. Judging the scene from Gay's standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political gathering of a thinly settled community. The words, she knew now, were familiar. It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with freshness, with inspiration. What was it but the old plea for social regeneration through political purity—an appeal to put the dream of the idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.

"He can speak all right," observed Gay carelessly, "there's no doubt about that."

"I'd like to go, if you don't mind," answered Molly, and turning she rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet, too small to be called a village. An old man, killing slugs in a potato field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging loosely between his lips. Then when they had disappeared, he shook his head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently murdering slugs.

"'Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they've come arter," he muttered. "Things warn't so in my day, so they oughtn't to be so now. I ain't got no use for anything that ain't never been befo'."

And in different language, the same thought was stirring in Gay's mind. "It's all stuff and nonsense, these hifaluting radical theories. There's never been a fairer distribution of property and there's never going to be."

They rode in silence under the flowering locust-trees in the single street, and then, crossing the grassy common, cantered between two ripening fields of oats, and turned into the leafy freshness of the Applegate road. The sun was high, but the long, still shadows had begun to slant from the west, and the silence was brooding in a mellow light over the distance.

"I don't know what we're coming to," said Gay at last, when they had ridden a mile or two without speaking. What he really meant, though he did not say it, was, "I don't know why in the devil's name you keep thinking about that fellow?"

Though his own emotions were superior to reason, he was vaguely irritated because Molly had allowed hers, even in a small matter, to assert such a supremacy. He was accustomed to speak carelessly of woman as "an emotional being," yet this did not prevent his feeling an indignant surprise when woman, as occasionally happened, illustrated the truth of his inherited generalization. A lover of the unconventional for himself, he was almost as strong a hater of it for the women who were related to him. It would have annoyed him excessively to see Kesiah make herself conspicuous in any way, or deviate by a hair's breadth from the accepted standard of her sex. And now Molly, with whom he had fallen in love, had actually flushed and paled under his eyes at the sight of young Revercomb! In some subtle manner she seemed to have stooped in his estimation—to have lowered herself from the high and narrow pedestal upon which he had placed her! Yet so contradictory are the passions, that he felt he loved her the more, if possible, because of the angry soreness at his heart.

Turning in the direction of Applegate, they continued their ride at a canter, and the afternoon was over when they passed the cross-roads again on their homeward way. A thin mist floated like thistledown from the marshes, which were so distant that they were visible only as a pinkish edge to the horizon. Large noisy insects, with iridescent wings, hovered around the purple, heavy scented tubes of the Jamestown weeds by the roadside, and the turnpike, glimmering like a white band through the purple dusk, was spangled with fireflies. Gay was talking as they approached the blazed pine, which stood out sinister and black against the afterglow, and it was only when Molly cried out sharply that he saw Blossom's face looking at them again over the tiger lilies.

"Why, what in the deuce!" he exclaimed, not in anger, but in amazement.

"Blossom, wait for me!" called Molly, and would have slipped to the ground had not Gay reached out and held her in the saddle.

Then the figure of Blossom, which had waited there evidently since their first passing, vanished like an apparition into the grey twilight. The pallid face floated from them through the grape-scented mist, and Molly's call brought no answer except the cry of a whip-poor-will from the thicket.



CHAPTER XII

ONE OF LOVE'S VICTIMS

A week later Jim Halloween stopped with a bit of news at Bottom's Ordinary, where old Adam Doolittle dozed under the mulberry tree in a rush chair which had been brought over in his son's oxcart.

"Have you all heard that our Mr. Mullen has accepted a call to larger fields?" he inquired, "an' that Judy Revercomb has gone clean daft because he's going to leave us?"

"She didn't have far to go," observed Mrs. Bottom.

"Well, you'd never have known it to look at her," commented young Adam, "but 'tis a true sayin' that you can't tell the quality of the meat by the colour of the feathers."

"You'd better be speakin' particular, suh, an' not general," retorted old Adam, who was in a querulous mood as the result of too abrupt an awakening from his nap. "What you ain't known it doesn't follow other folks ain't, does it? Human natur is generally made with a streak of foolishness an' a streak of sense, just as fat an' lean runs in a piece of bacon. That's what I say, an' I reckon I ought to know, bein' turned ninety."

"All the same thar's some folks that ain't streaked at all, but a solid lump of silliness like Judy Hatch," returned his son.

This was too much for the patience of the patriarchial spirit, and old Adam began to shake as though he were suddenly smitten with palsy.

"What do you mean by contradictin' me, suh? Didn't I bring you into the world?" he demanded.

A reproachful shake of the head passed round the group.

"You oughtn't to contradict him, young Adam. Ain't he yo' pa?" said Mrs. Bottom, rebukingly.

"I warn't contradictin', I was talkin'," replied young Adam, abashed by the evident disapprobation that surrounded him.

"Well, don't talk, suh, until you can talk sense," rejoined his father. "When a talker has turned ninety an' can meet me on equal ground, I'll consent to argue with him."

His lower lip protruded threateningly from his toothless gums, while two tears of anger rolled slowly out of his eyes and over his veined and roughened cheeks to the crescent shaped hollow of his chin. So deeply rooted in his mind was the conviction that his ninety years furnished an unanswerable argument for the truth of his opinions, that the assurance of experience had conferred upon him something of that manner of superhuman authority with which the assurance of inexperience had endowed Mr. Mullen.

"I for one was al'ays against Abel's marrying," interposed Betsey with a placable air. "I knew she'd be a drag on him, an' now that he's goin' into politics with sech good chances, the mo's the pity. I've told him so time and agin when he stopped at the or'nary."

At this point the appearance of Solomon Hatch caused her to explain hurriedly, "We were jest speakin' of Abel an' his chances for the Legislature. You've got a mighty good son-in-law, Solomon."

"Yes," said Solomon, sourly, "yes, but Judy's a fool."

The confession had burst from an overburdened soul, for like Gay he could tolerate no divergence from the straight line of duty, no variation from the traditional type, in any woman who was related to him. Men would be men, he was aware, but if any phrase so original as "women will be women" had been propounded to him, he would probably have retorted with philosophic cynicism, that "he did not see the necessity." His vision was enclosed in a circle beyond which he could not penetrate even if he had desire to, and the conspicuous fact within this circle at the moment was that Judy had made a fool of herself—that she had actually burst out crying in church when Mr. Mullen had announced his acceptance of a distant call! He was sorry for Abel, because Judy was his wife, but, since it is human nature to exaggerate the personal element, he was far sorrier for himself because she was his daughter.

"Yes, Judy's a fool," he repeated angrily, and there was a bitter comfort in the knowledge that he had first put into words the thought that had engaged every mind at the ordinary.

"Oh, she's young yet, an' she'll outgrow it," observed Betsey as sincerely as she had made the opposite remark some minutes before. "A soft heart is mo' to be pitied than blamed, an' it'll soon harden into shape now she's settled down to matrimony."

"I ain't never seen a female with an ounce of good hard sense except you, Mrs. Bottom," replied Solomon. "Thar's a contrariness in the rest of 'em that makes 'em tryin' companions to a rational critter like man, with a firm grip on his heart. To think of gittin' a husband like Abel Revercomb—the risin' man in the county—an' then to turn aside from the comforts of life on o'count of nothin' mo' than a feelin'."

"Well, it ain't as if she'd taken a fancy to a plain, ordinary kind of man," remarked Betsey. "Thar's somethin' mo' elevatin' about a parson, an' doubtless it's difficult to come down from a pulpit to common earth when you've once lifted yo' eyes to it. Thar warn't no shame about her cryin' out like that in church. They ought to have broke it to her mo' gently."

"I warn't thar," said old Adam, "but how did Abel conduct himself?"

"Oh, he just got up an' led her out sort of gently, while she was cryin' an' sobbin' so loud that it drowned what Mr. Mullen was sayin'," replied Betsey.

"Thar ain't a better husband in the county," said Solomon, "accordin' to a man's way of lookin' at it, but it seems a woman is never satisfied."

"I'm glad I never married," remarked young Adam, "for I might have got one of the foolish sort seein' as they're so plentiful."

"Well, I never axed much bein' so unattractive to the sex," observed Jim Halloween, "an' as long as a woman was handsome, with a full figger, an' sweet tempered an' thrifty an' a good cook, with a sure hand for pastry, an' al'ays tidy, with her hair curlin' naturally, an' neat an' fresh without carin' about dress, I'd have been easy to please with just the things any man might have a right to expect."

"It's the way with life that those that ax little usually get less," commented old Adam, "I ain't sayin' it's all as it ought to be, but by the time the meek inherit the earth thar'll be precious little left on it except the leavin's of the proud."

"Thar ain't any way of cultivatin' a proud natur when you're born meek, is thar?" inquired his son.

"None that I ever heerd of unless it be to marry a meeker wife. Thar's something in marriage that works contrariwise, an' even a worm of a man will begin to try to trample if he marries a worm of a woman. Who's that ridin' over the three roads, young Adam?"

"It's Abel Revercomb. Come in an' pass the time of day with us, Abel."

But the miller merely shouted back that he had ridden to Piping Tree for a bottle of medicine, and went on at a gallop. Then he passed from the turnpike into the sunken road that led to the mill, and the cloud of dust kicked up by his mare drifted after him into the distance.

In spite of the scene in church, Abel had felt no resentment against Judy. He knew that she had made herself ridiculous in the eyes of the congregation, and that people were pitying him on account of her hopeless infatuation for the young clergyman, but because he was indifferent to her in his heart, he was able to look at the situation from an impersonal point of view, and to realize something of what she had suffered. When Solomon had railed at her after the service, Abel had stopped him in indignation.

"If you can't speak civilly to my wife, you can leave my house," he said sharply.

"Good God, man! Don't you know she's making a laughin' stock of you?"

"That's a lie!" Abel had replied curtly, and Solomon, with the craven spirit of all natural despots, had muttered beneath his breath that he "reckoned, after all, it must have been a sudden attack of sickness."

Of the attack and its nature Abel had said no word after this even to Judy. During that embarrassed walk out of the church, while she clung sobbing hysterically to his arm, he had resolved once for all that, even though her behaviour cost him his ambition, he would never stoop to reproach her. What right, indeed, had he to reproach her when he loved Molly quite as madly, if not so openly, as she loved the rector? It was as if he looked on Judy's suffering through his own, and was therefore endowed with a quality of understanding which his ordinary perceptions would never have given him.

When he came in sight of the mill, the flash of red wheels caught his eyes, and he distinguished Mr. Mullen's gig in the road in front of the door. Having seen Judy as he rode by on his round of visits, the rector had stopped for a moment to inquire if she had entirely recovered her health.

"I was much concerned about her illness in church yesterday," he remarked, turning to the miller.

"I didn't know she was up," replied Abel, observing the inflamed and swollen state of her features, which had apparently escaped the notice of Mr. Mullen. "Oughtn't you to have stayed in bed, Judy?" he asked kindly.

"Oh, no, I'd rather be about," responded Judy hurriedly. "I came over from the house with a message for you when I saw Mr. Mullen passin'."

"I am trying a young horse of Jim Halloween's," said the clergyman, "my bay has gone lame, and Jim offered me this one for the day. Badly broken and needs a firm bit. I'm inclined to believe that he has never been put between shafts before, for I had quite a sharp tussle with him about passing that threshing machine in Bumpass's field."

"Oh, that roans all right if you don't fret him," replied Abel, who had a poor opinion of the rector's horsemanship. "Stop jerking at his mouth, and give him his head."

But the Reverend Orlando, having drifted naturally into the habit of thinking that he had been placed here to offer, not to receive, instruction, appeared a little restive under the other's directions.

"I flatter myself that I possess the understanding of horses," he replied. "I've never had a disagreement with Harry, though I've driven him every day since I've been here."

"All the same I'd keep a steady hand if I were going by that threshing machine up the road," rejoined Abel who magnanimously refrained from adding that he had assisted at the purchase of Harry, and that horse had been fourteen, if a day, when he passed into the clergyman's keeping.

A healthful glow suffused Mr. Mullen's cheeks, while he struggled valiantly to conceal his annoyance. He was very young, and in spite of his early elevation to a position of spiritual leadership, he remained after all merely an ordinary mortal. So he stiffened perceptibly on the shiny seat of his gig, and gave a sharp pull at the reins, which wrenched the head of the young roan away from a clump of sassafras.

"It is better for every man to follow his own ideas, don't you think, Mr. Revercomb?" he replied, advocating in his resentment a principle which he would have been the first to rap soundly had it been advanced by one of his parishioners. "I mean, of course, in the matter of driving."

"When do you go?" asked Judy suddenly, and turned her face away because she could not trust herself to meet his beautiful, earnest eyes.

"Within a fortnight. It is important that I should assume my new responsibilities immediately."

"And you won't come back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which would never be finished.

He was a kind-hearted young man, who wished well to all the world, and especially to those of his congregation who had profited spiritually by his sermons. If he had suspected the existence of Judy's passion, it would undoubtedly have distressed him—but he did not suspect it, owing to a natural obliquity of vision, which kept him looking away from the world as it is in the direction of a mental image of the world as he imagined it. So, with an amiable word or two of regret that Providence had arranged his removal to wider fields, he drove on, sitting very erect and sawing earnestly at the mouth of the young horse.

"He's a first-rate parson, but a darn fool of a horseman," observed Abel, with the disgust of a good driver for a poor one. "You'd better go in and lie down, Judy, you look like a ghost."

"I don't want to lie down—I wish I were dead," replied Judy, choking back her hysterical sobs. Then turning suddenly into the mill, she sank against the old mill-stone on the wooden platform and burst into a fit of wild and agonized weeping. Her hand, when he touched it, was as cold as clay and as unresponsive to his.

"Judy," he said and his voice was wonderfully gentle, "does it really mean so much to you? Are you honestly grieving like this about Mr. Mullen?"

If he had only known it his gentleness to her was the thing for which at times she almost hated him. The woman in her was very primitive—a creature that harked back to the raw sensations of the jungle—and nothing less than sheer brutality on Abel's part could free her from the charm of the young clergyman's unconscious cruelty.

She looked up at him with accusing eyes, which said, "I don't care who knows that I love him," as plainly as did her huddled and trembling figure, clinging pathetically to the old mill-stone, as though it were some crudely symbolic Rock of Ages which she embraced.

"Is it because he is going away or would you have felt this just as much if he had stayed?" he asked, after a minute in which he had watched her with humorous compassion.

Raising herself at the question, she pushed the damp hair from her forehead, and sat facing him on the edge of the platform.

"I could have borne it—if—if I might have had his sermons every Sunday to help me," she answered, and there was no consciousness of shame, hardly any recognition of her abasement, in her tone. Like all helpless victims of great emotions, she had ceased to be merely an individual and had become the vehicle of some impersonal destructive force in nature. It was not Judy, but the passion within her that was speaking through her lips.

"But what good would they have done you? You would have been miserable still."

"At—at least I should have seen him, an'—an' been strengthened in my religion—-"

The grotesque, the pitiless horror of it struck him for an instant. That she was half distraught and wholly morbid, he saw from her look, and the sight awakened that indomitable pity which had served always as a medium for the biting irony of life.

"To save my soul I can't see what satisfaction you would have got out of that," he remarked.

"I did—I did. They helped me to be spiritual minded," wailed Judy with the incoherence of complete despair. If her infatuation was ridiculous, it occurred to Abel that her courage, at least, was sublime. From a distance and with brighter hair, she might even have been mistaken for a tragic example of immortal passion. The lover in his blood pitied her, but the Calvinist refused to take her seriously.

"Well, if I were you, I'd go in and lie down," he said feeling that it was, after all, the best advice he could offer her. "You're sick, that's what's the matter with you, and a cup of tea will do you more good than hugging that old mill-stone. I know you can't help it, Judy," he added in response to a gesture of protestation, "you were born that way, and none of us, I reckon, can help the way we're born." And since it is easier for a man to change his creed than his inheritance, he spoke in the tone of stern fatalism in which Sarah, glancing about her at life, was accustomed to say to herself, "It's like that, an' thar wouldn't be any justice in it except for original sin."

Judy struggled blindly to her feet, and still he did not touch her. In spite of his quiet words there was a taste of bitterness on his lips, as though his magnanimity had turned to wormwood while he was speaking. After all, he told himself in a swift revulsion of feeling, Judy was his wife and she had made him ridiculous.

"I know it's hard on you," she said, pausing on the threshold in the vain hope, he could see, that some word would be uttered which would explain things or at least make them bearable. None was spoken, and her foot was on the single step that led to the path, when there came the sound of a horse running wildly up the road through the cornlands, and the next instant the young roan passed them, dragging Mr. Mullen's shattered rig in the direction of the turnpike.

"Let me get there, Judy," said Abel, pushing her out of his way, "something has happened!"

But his words came too late. At sight of the empty gig, she uttered a single despairing shriek, and started at a run down the bank, and over the mill-stream. Midway of the log, she stumbled shrieked again, and fell heavily to the stream below, from which Abel caught her up as if she were a child, and carried her to the opposite side, and across the rocky road to the house. As she lay on Sarah's bed, with Blossom working over her, she began to scream anew, half unconsciously, in the voice of frenzied terror with which she had cried out at the sound of the running horse. Her face was grey, but around her mouth there was a blue circle that made it look like the sunken mouth of an old woman, and her eyes—in which that stark terror was still visible, as though it had been rendered indelible by the violence of the shock that had called it into being—seemed looking through the figures around her, with the intense yet unseeing gaze with which one might look through shadows in search of an object one does not find.

"Get the doctor at once, Abel," said Blossom, "Grandma says something has happened to bring on Judy's time. Had you two been quarrelling?"

"Good God, no. Mr. Mullen's horse ran away with him and Judy saw it before I could catch her. I don't know yet whether he is dead or alive."

"I saw him running bareheaded through the cornfield just as you brought Judy in, and I wondered what was the matter. He was going after his horse, I suppose."

"Well, he's done enough harm for one day. I'm off to Piping Tree for Dr. Fairley."

But two hours later, when he returned, with the physician on horseback at his side, Mr. Mullen's driving, like most earnest yet ignorant endeavours, had already resulted in disaster. All night they worked over Judy, who continued to stare through them, as though they were but shadows which prevented her from seeing the object for which she was looking. Then at sunrise, having brought a still-born child into the world, she turned her face to the wall and passed out of it in search of the adventure that she had missed.



CHAPTER XIII

WHAT LIFE TEACHES

Judy was laid away amid the low green ridges in the churchyard, where the drowsy hum of the threshing in a wheatfield across the road, was the only reminder of the serious business of life. And immediately, as if the beneficent green had enveloped her memory, her weaknesses were effaced and her virtues were exalted in the minds of the living. Their judgment was softened by a vague feeling of awe, but they were not troubled, while they stood in a solemn and curious row around her grave, by any sense of the pathetic futility of individual suffering in the midst of a universe that creates and destroys in swarms. The mystery aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in youth their groping spiritual impulses.

On the following Sunday, before leaving for fresher fields, Mr. Mullen preached a sermon which established him forever in the hearts of his congregation, and in the course of it, he alluded tenderly to "the exalted Christian woman who has been recently removed from among us to a brighter sphere." It was, on the whole as Mrs. Gay observed afterwards, "his most remarkable effort"; and even Sarah Revercomb, who had heard that her daughter-in-law was to be mentioned in the pulpit, and had attended from the same spiritual pride with which she had read the funeral notice in the Applegate papers, admitted on her way home that she "wished poor Judy could have heard him." In spite of the young woman's removal to a sphere which Mr. Mullen had described as "brighter," she had become from the instant of her decease, "poor Judy" in Sarah's thoughts as well as on her lips.

To Abel her death had brought a shock which was not so much a sense of personal regret, as an intensified expression of the pity he had felt for her while she lived. The huddled figure against the mill-stone had acquired a new significance in the act of dying. A dignity which had never been hers in life, enfolded her when she lay with the accusing and hostile look in her face fading slowly into an expression of peace. With the noble inconsistency of a generous heart, he began to regard Judy dead with a tenderness he had never been able to feel for Judy living. The less she demanded of him, the more he was ready to give her.

"I declar' it does look as if Abel was mournin'," remarked Betsey Bottom to Sarah on a September afternoon several months later. "It ain't suprisin' in his case seein' he jest married her to get even with Molly."

"I don't believe myself in settin' round an' nursin' grief," responded Sarah, "a proper show of respect is well an' good, but nobody can expect a hearty, able bodied man to keep his thoughts turned on the departed. With women, now, it's different, for thar's precious little satisfaction some women get out of thar husbands till they start to wearin' weeds for 'em."

"You've worn weeds steady now, ain't you, Mrs. Revercomb?"

Sarah set her mouth tightly. "They were too costly to lay away," she replied, and the words were as real a eulogy of her husband as she had ever uttered.

"It's a pity Abel lost Molly Merryweather," said Betsey. "Is thar any likelihood of thar comin' together again? Or is it true—as the rumour keeps up—that she is goin' to marry Mr. Jonathan befo' many months?"

"It ain't likely she'll throw away all that good money once she's got used to it," said Sarah. "For my part, I don't hold with the folks that blamed her for her choice. Thar ain't many husbands that would be worthy of thar hire, an' how was she to find out, till she tried, if Abel was one of those few or not?"

"He al'ays seemed to me almost too promisin' for his good looks, Mrs. Revercomb. I'm mighty partial to looks in a man, thar ain't no use my denyin' it."

"Well, I ain't," said Sarah, "they're no mo' than dross an' cobwebs in my sight, but we're made different an' thar's no sense arguin' about tastes—though I must say for me that I could never understand how a modest woman like you could confess to takin' pleasure in the sight of a handsome man."

"Well, immodest or not, I hold to it," replied Betsey in as amiable a manner as if there had been no reflection upon her refinement. "Abel stands a good chance for the legislature now, don't he?"

"I ain't a friend to that, for I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em, and thar ain't nothin' that takes the place of cleanness with me." In her heart she felt for Betsey something of the contempt which the stoic in all ranks of life feels for the epicurean.

At supper that night Sarah repeated this conversation, and to her astonishment, not Abel, but Blossom, went pitiably white and flinched back sharply as if fearing a second fall of the lash.

"I don't believe it! Mr. Jonathan will never marry Molly. There's no truth in it!" she cried.

Over the coffee-pot which she has holding, Sarah stared at her in perplexity. "Why, whatever has come over you, Blossom?" she asked.

"You haven't been yo'self for a considerable spell, daughter," said Abner, turning to her with a pathetic, anxious expression on his great hairy face. "Do you feel sick or mopin'?"

He looked at Blossom as a man looks at the only thing he loves in life when he sees that thing suffering beneath his eyes and cannot divine the cause. The veins grew large and stood out on his forehead, and the big knotted hand that was carrying his cup to his lips, trembled in the air and then sank slowly back to the table. His usually dull and indifferent gaze became suddenly piercing as if it were charged with electricity.

"It's nothing, father," said Blossom, pressing her hand to her bosom, as though she were choking for breath, "and it's all silly talk, I know, about Molly."

"What does it matter to you if it's true?" demanded Sarah tartly, but Blossom, driven from the room by a spasm of coughing, had already disappeared.

It was a close September night, and as Abel crossed the road to look for a young heifer in the meadow the heavy scent of the Jamestown weeds seemed to float downward beneath the oppressive weight of the atmosphere. The sawing of the katydids came to him out of the surrounding darkness, through which a light, gliding like a gigantic glow-worm along the earth, revealed presently the figure of Jonathan Gay, mounted on horseback and swinging a lantern from his saddle.

"A dark night, Revercomb."

"Yes, there'll be rain before morning."

"Well, it won't do any harm. The country needs it. I'm glad to hear, by the way, that you are going into politics. You're a capital speaker. I heard you last summer at Piping Tree."

He rode on, and Abel forgot the meeting until, on his way back from the meadow, he ran against Blossom, who was coming rather wildly from the direction in which Jonathan had vanished.

"What has upset you so, Blossom? You are like a ghost. Did you meet Mr. Jonathan?"

"No, why should I meet Mr. Jonathan? What do you mean?"

Without replying she turned from him and ran into the house, while following her more soberly, he asked himself carelessly what could have happened to disturb her. "I wonder if she is frettin' about the rector?" he thought, and his utter inability to understand, or even to recognize the contradictions in the nature of women oppressed his mind. "First, she wanted Mr. Mullen and he didn't want her, then he wanted her and she didn't want him, and now when he's evidently left off caring again, she appears to be grievin' herself sick about him. I wonder if it's always like that—everybody wanting the person that wants somebody else? And yet I know I loved Molly a hundred times more, if that were possible, when I believed she cared for me." He remembered the December afternoon so many years ago, when she had run away from the school in Applegate, and he had found her breasting a heavy snow storm on the road to Jordan's Journey. Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday.

Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture.

"I thought you had gone," he said, and held out his hand.

"Not yet. Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October."

In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight.

"Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day in June?" she asked suddenly.

"I didn't know it, but it was nice of you."

His renunciation had conferred a dignity upon him which had in it something of the quiet and the breadth of the Southern landscape. She knew while she looked at him that he had accepted her decision once for all—that he still accepted it in spite of the ensuing logic of events which had refuted its finality. The choice had been offered her between love and the world, and she had chosen the world—chosen in the heat of youth, in the thirst for experience. She had not loved enough. Her love had been slight, young, yielding too easily to the impact of other desires. There had been no illusion to shelter it. She had never, she remembered now, had any illusions—all had been of the substance and the fibre of reality. Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it differently. At the time flight from love was as necessary to her growth as the return to love was necessary to her happiness to-day. She saw clearly that her return was, after all, the result of her flight. If she had not chosen the world, she would never have known how little the world signified in comparison with simpler things. Life was all of a single piece; it was impossible to pull it apart and say "without this it would have been better"—since nothing in it was unrelated to the rest, nothing in it existed by itself and independent of the events that preceded it and came after it. Born as she had been out of sin, and the tragic expiation of sin, she had learned more quickly than other women, as though the spectre of the unhappy Janet stood always at her side to help her to a deeper understanding and a sincerer pity. She knew now that if she loved Abel, it was because all other interests and emotions had faded like the perishable bloom on the meadow before the solid, the fundamental fact of her need of him.

"Do you still get books from the library in Applegate?" she asked because she could think of nothing to say that sounded less trivial.

"Sometimes, and second hand ones from a dealer I've found there. One corner of the mill is given up to them."

Again there was silence, and then she said impulsively in her old childlike way.

"Abel, have you ever forgiven me?"

"There was nothing to forgive. You see, I've learned, Molly."

"What you've learned is that I wasn't worth loving, I suppose?"

He laughed softly. "The truth is, I never knew how much you were worth till I gave you up," he answered.

"It was the same way with me—that's life, perhaps."

"That sounded like my mother. You're too young to have learned what it means."

"I don't believe I was ever young—I seem to have known about the sadness of life from my cradle. That was why I wanted so passionately some of its gaiety. I remember I used to think that Paris meant gaiety, but when we went there I couldn't get over my surprise because of all the ragged people and the poor, miserable horses. They spoiled it to me."

"The secret is not to look, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes. Jonathan never looked. It all depends, he used to tell me—upon which set of facts I chose to regard—and he calls it philosophical not to regard any but pleasant ones."

"Perhaps he's right, but isn't it, after all, a question of the way he's made?"

"Everything is; grandfather used to say that was why he was never able to judge people. Life was woven of many colours, like Joseph's coat, he once told me, and we could make dyes run, but we couldn't wash them entirely out. He couldn't make himself resentful when he tried—not even with—with Mr. Jonathan."

"Have you ever forgiven him, Molly?"

"I've sometimes thought that he was sorry at the end—but how could that undo the way he treated my mother? Being sorry when you're dying doesn't help things you've hurt in life—but, then, grandfather would have said, I suppose, that it was life, not Mr. Jonathan, that was to blame. And I can see, too, in a way, that we sometimes do things we don't want to do—that we don't even mean to do—that we regret ever afterwards—just because life drives us to do them—" For a minute she hesitated, and then added bravely, "I learned that by taking Mr. Jonathan's money."

"But you were right," he answered.

"To have the choice between love and money, and to choose—money?"

"You're putting it harshly. It wasn't money you chose—it was the world or Old Church—Jordan's Journey or the grist mill."

For a moment the throbbing of her heart stifled her. Then she found her voice.

"If I had the choice now I'd choose Old Church and the grist mill," she said.

There was a short silence, and while it lasted she waited trembling, her hand outstretched, her mouth quivering for his kisses. She remembered how eagerly his lips had turned to hers in the past as one who thirsted for water.

But when he spoke again it was in the same quiet voice.

"Would you, Molly!" he answered gently, and that was all. It was not a question, but an acceptance. He made no movement toward her. His eyes did not search her face.

They turned and walked slowly across the pasture over the life-everlasting, which diffused under their feet a haunting and ghostly fragrance. Myriads of grasshoppers chanted in the warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint purple haze on the horizon.

"If I could change it all now—could take you out of the life that suits you and bring you back to the mill—I wouldn't do it. I like to think I'm decent enough not even to want to do it," he said.

They had reached the fence that separated Gay's pasture from his, and stopping, he held out his hand with a smile.

"I hear you're to marry Jonathan Gay," he added, "and whether or not you do, God bless you."

"But I'm not, Abel!" she cried passionately as he turned away.

He did not look back, and when he had passed out of hearing, she repeated her words with a passionate repudiation of the thing he had suggested, "I'm not, Abel!—I'm not!"



CHAPTER XIV

THE TURN OF THE WHEEL

Tears blinded her eyes as she crossed the pasture, and when she brushed them away, she could see nothing distinctly except the single pointed maple that lifted its fiery torch above the spectral procession of the aspens in the graveyard. She had passed under the trees at the Poplar Spring, and was deep in the witch-hazel boughs which made a screen for the Haunt's Walk, when beyond a sudden twist in the path, she saw ahead of her the figures of Blossom Revercomb and Jonathan Gay. At first they showed merely in dim outlines standing a little apart, with the sunlit branch of a sweet gum tree dropping between them. Then as Molly went forward over the velvety carpet of leaves, she saw the girl make a swift and appealing movement of her arms.

"Oh, Jonathan, if you only would! I can't bear it any longer!" she cried, with her hands on his shoulders.

He drew away, kindly, almost caressingly. He was in hunting clothes, and the barrel of his gun, Molly saw, came between him and Blossom, gently pressing her off.

"You don't understand, Blossom, I've told you a hundred times it is out of the question," he answered.

Then looking up his eyes met Molly's, and he stood silent without defence or explanation, before her.

"What is impossible, Jonathan? Can I help you?" she asked impulsively, and going quickly to Blossom's side she drew the girl's weeping face to her breast. "You're in trouble, darling—tell me, tell Molly about it," she said.

As they clung together in a passion of despair and of pity—the one appealing by sheer helplessness, the other giving succour out of an abundant self-reliance—Gay became conscious that he was witnessing the secret wonder of Molly's nature. The relation of woman to man was dwarfed suddenly by an understanding of the relation of woman to woman. Deeper than the dependence of sex, simpler, more natural, closer to the earth, as though it still drew its strength from the soil, he realized that the need of woman for woman was not written in the songs nor in the histories of men, but in the neglected and frustrated lives which the songs and the histories of men had ignored.

"Tell me, Blossom—tell Molly," said the soft voice again.

"Molly!" he said sharply, and as she looked at him over Blossom's prostrate head, he met a light of anger that seemed, while it lasted, to illumine her features.

"Blossom and I were married nearly two years ago," he said.

"Nearly two years ago?" she repeated. "Why have we never known it?"

"I had to think of my mother," he replied almost doggedly. Then driven by a rush of anger against Blossom because she was to blame for it all—because he had ever seen her, because he had ever desired her, because he had ever committed the supreme folly of marrying her, and, most of all, because she had, in her indiscretion, betrayed him to Molly—he added with the cruelty which is possible sometimes to generous and kindly natures—"It was a mistake, of course. I am ready to do anything in my power for her happiness, but it wouldn't be for her happiness for us to start living together."

Blossom raised her face from Molly's bosom, and the strong sunlight shining through the coloured leaves, showed the blanched look of her skin and the fine lines chiselled by tears around her eyes. Encircling her mouth, which Gay had once described as looking "as though it would melt if you kissed it," there was now a heavy blue shadow which detracted from the beauty of her still red and voluptuous lips. In many ways she was finer, larger, nobler than when he had first met her—for experience, which had blighted her physical loveliness, appeared, also, to have increased the dignity and quietness of her soul. Had Gay been able to see her soul it would probably have moved him, for he was easily stirred by the thing that was beneath the eyes. But it was impossible to present a woman's soul to him as a concrete image.

"I don't want to live with him—I don't want anything from him," responded Blossom, with pride. "I don't want anything from him ever again," she repeated, and putting Molly's arms away from her, she turned and moved slowly down the Haunt's Walk toward the Poplar Spring.

"I couldn't help loving you, could I, Molly?" he asked in a low voice.

Her face was pale and stern when she answered.

"And you couldn't help loving Blossom last year, I suppose?"

"If I could have helped, do you think I should have done it? You don't understand such things, Molly."

"No, I don't understand them. When love has to cloak cruelty and faithlessness, I can't see that it's any better than the thing it excuses."

"But all love isn't alike. I don't love you in the least as I loved Blossom. That was a mere impulse, and incident."

"But how was Blossom to know that? and how am I?"

"One can't explain it to a woman. They're not made of flesh and blood as men are."

"They've had to drill their flesh and blood," she replied, stern rather than scornful.

"I might have known you'd be hard, Molly."

When she spoke again her voice had softened.

"Jonathan, it's no use thinking of me—go back to Blossom," she said.

"Not thinking of you won't make me go back to Blossom. When that sort of thing is over, it is over once for all."

"Even if that is true you mustn't think of me—because I belong—every bit of me—to Abel."

He stared at her for a moment in silence. "Then it's true," he said at last under his breath.

"It has always been true—ever since anything was true."

"But you didn't always know it."

"I had to grow to it. I believe I have been growing to it forever. Everything has helped me to it—even my mistakes."

She spoke quite simply. Her earnestness was so large that it had swept away her shyness and her self-consciousness, as a strong wind sweeps away the smoke over the autumn meadows. And yet this very earnestness, this passionate sincerity, added but another fold to the luminous evil of mystery in which she was enveloped. He could not understand her when she tried to tear the veil away and the terrible clearness of her soul blinded his sight. Therein lay her charm for him—he could never reach her, could never possess her even should she seek to approach him. Behind the mystery of darkness which he might penetrate, there was still the mystery of light.

"If you really care about him like that I don't see why you gave him up and went away from him," he said helplessly. "You wanted to go. Nobody urged you. It was your own choice."

"Yes, that's what you could never understand. I wasn't really going away from him when I went. I was going to him. It was a long and a roundabout road, but it was safer."

"You mean it brought you back in the end?"

"It not only brought me back, it showed me things by the way. It made me understand about you and Blossom."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and was silent. The pang of his loss was swallowed up in the amplitude of his wonder.

"Are you going to marry him, Molly?" he asked when the silence had become unbearable.

"If he wants me. I'm not quite sure that he wants me. I know he loves me," she added, "but that isn't just the same."

He did not answer, and they stood looking beyond the thick foliage in the Haunt's Walk, to the meadows, over which a golden haze shimmered as though it were filled with the beating of invisible wings.

"Molly," he said suddenly. "Shall I go after Blossom?"

"Oh, if you would, dear Jonathan," she answered.

Without a word, he turned from her and walked rapidly down the path Blossom had followed.

When he had disappeared, Molly went up the walk to the Italian garden, and then ascending the front steps passed into the drawing room, where Kesiah and Mrs. Gay sat in the glow of a cedar fire, reading a new life of Lord Byron.

Kesiah's voice, droning monotonously like the loud hum of bees, rose above the faint crackling of the logs, on which Mrs. Gay had fixed her soft, unfathomable eyes, while she reconstructed, after the habit of her imagination, certain magnificent adventures in the poet's life.

"Have you seen Jonathan, Molly?" asked Kesiah, laying aside her book while Mrs. Gay wiped her eyes.

"Yes, I left him in the Haunt's Walk."

"He has not seemed well of late," said Mrs. Gay softly, "I am trying to persuade him to leave us and go back to Europe."

"He is anxious about your health and doesn't like to go so far away from you," replied Molly, sitting on an ottoman beside her chair.

Taking her hand, Mrs. Gay caressed it while she answered.

"I can never think of myself when Jonathan's happiness is to be considered." Then dropping her voice still lower, she added tenderly, "You are a great comfort to me, dear, a very great comfort."

What she meant, and Molly grasped her meaning as distinctly as if she had put it into words, was that she was comforted, she was reassured by the girl's obvious indifference to Jonathan's passion. Like many persons of sentimental turn of mind, she found no great difficulty in reconciling a visionary romanticism with a very practical regard for the more substantial values of life.

"I should never allow the question of my health to interfere with Jonathan's plans," she repeated, while her expression grew angelic in the light of her sacrificial fervour.

"I don't think he wants to go," retorted Kesiah rather snappily, and opening the book again she began to read.

For an hour her voice droned steadily in the firelight, while Molly, with her head against Mrs. Gay's knee, looked through the casement window to where the October roses bloomed and dropped in the squares of the Italian garden. Then at the sound of hurried footsteps on the walk outside, the girl rose from the ottoman and went out, closing the door after her. In the hall the blanched face of Uncle Abednego confronted her like the face of a spectre.

"I ain't a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela—I ain't a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela," he moaned, "Marse Jonathan, he's been shot down yonder at Poplar Spring des like Ole Marster!"



CHAPTER XV

GAY DISCOVERS HIMSELF

As Gay passed rapidly down the Haunt's Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there, listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps. At the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, "Blossom! Are you there, Blossom?" The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes.

"Damn you!" said a voice almost in a whisper. The next instant a shot rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its load into the air. His first confused impression was that he had knocked against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side. Then, as a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise, "I'm shot. By Jove, that's what it means—I'm shot." At the instant, underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him. But while the wonder was still engrossing him—in that same instant, which seemed to cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting. "It's ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me," he thought, while the little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud obscured it.

A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke in the cloudless blue. He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond, he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something—at anything—that would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this current—which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side, and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the graveyard—this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther away from the thing to which he was clinging—from this thing he could not let go because it was himself—because it had separated and distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe. "I've always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a multitude. There are at least a million of me—and any one of them might have crowded out all the others if he'd got a chance." A swift and joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never suspected. "Why didn't I know this before?" he asked, like one who stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of nature. "All this has been in me all the time, but nobody told me. I might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I am." The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer frightened him.

"It's only the hum of bees in the meadow," he said after a minute, "and yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle. And now I've forgotten what I was thinking about. It was very important, but I shall never remember it." He closed his eyes, while the ghostly fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud to envelop him. Something brushed his face like the touch of wings, and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a bough of the great poplar above him. He had never seen anything in his life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil spread over something that was shining beyond it. "I wonder if I'm dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead, it really doesn't matter—an idiot could see through anything so thin as this."

Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered feeling the same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him—that he was in the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.

And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, "It isn't really my fault that I couldn't change things"; and then the faces of women he had seen but once, or passed in the street and remembered; and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . . "I wish they'd leave me alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, "I wish they'd keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out—that he might even remember the important things he had forgotten. "Abner Revercomb shot me," he said aloud. "I don't know much. I don't know whether I am alive or dead. All I am certain of is that it doesn't matter in the least—that it's too small a fact to make any fuss about. It's all so small—the blamed thing isn't any more important than those bees humming out there in the meadow. And I might as well have developed into any one of my other selves. What were all those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything? Why, I might have been a hero—it was in me all the time—I might even have been a god."

Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something outside of himself—something that had been tacked on to him. He felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs—that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his brain.

"I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning."

A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting.

"Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man.

Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a stranger's—repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?"

"Did you see who shot you?" said the voice.

And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?"

"Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice.

He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner Revercomb or one of his own multitude of selves that had shot him. It made no difference—nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable sense of approaching discovery which he had lost.

"Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly.

He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer.

"It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous."

It was there again—the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him.



CHAPTER XVI

THE END

In the middle of the afternoon Molly went into the spare room in the west wing, and stopped beside the high white bed on which Gay was lying, with the sheet turned down from his face. In death his features wore a look of tranquil brightness, of arrested energy, as if he had paused suddenly for a brief space, and meant to rise and go on again about the absorbing business of living. The windows were open, and through the closed shutters floated a pale greenish light and the sound of dead leaves rustling softly in the garden.

She had hardly entered before the door opened noiselessly again, and Kesiah came in bringing some white roses in a basket. Drawing a little away, Molly watched her while she arranged the flowers with light and guarded movements, as if she were afraid of disturbing the sleeper. Of what was she thinking? the girl wondered. Was she grieving for her lost youth, with its crushed possibilities of happiness, or for the rich young life before her, which had left its look of arrested energy still clinging to the deserted features? Was she saddened by the tragic mystery of Death or by the more poignant, the more inscrutable mystery of Life? Did she mourn all the things that had not been that did not matter, or all the things that had been that mattered even less?

Lifting her eyes from Kesiah's face, she fixed them on a small old picture of the elder Jonathan, which hung under a rusty sword above the bed. For the first time there came to her an impulse of compassion for the man who was her father. Perhaps he, also, had suffered because life had driven him to do the things that he hated—perhaps he, also, had had his secret chamber in which his spirit was crucified? With the thought something in her heart, which was like a lump of ice, melted suddenly, and she felt at peace. "Because I've lived," she said softly to herself, "I can understand."

And on the opposite side of the bed, between the long white curtains, Kesiah was thinking, "Because I've never lived, but have stood apart and watched life, I can understand."

Turning away presently, Molly went to the door, where she stood waiting until the elder woman joined her.

"Is Mr. Chamberlayne still with Aunt Angela?" she asked.

"Yes. He was on his way to visit her when Cephus met him near the cross-roads." For an instant she paused to catch her breath, and then added softly, "Angela is bearing it beautifully."

Stooping over, she picked up a few scattered rose leaves from the threshold and dropped them into the empty basket before she followed Molly down the hall of the west wing to the lattice door, which opened on the side-garden. Here the rustling of dead leaves grew louder, and faint scents of decay and mould were wafted through the evanescent beauty of the Indian summer.

While they stood there, Mr. Chamberlayne came down the staircase, wiping his eyes, which were very red, on his white silk handkerchief.

"She bears it beautifully, just as we might have expected," he said "I have seldom witnessed such fortitude, such saintly resignation to what she feels to be the will of God."

Molly's eyes left his face and turned to the purple and gold of the meadows, where webs of silver thistledown were floating over the path she had trodden only a few hours ago. Nothing had changed in the landscape—the same fugitive bloom was on the fields, the same shadows were on the hillside, the same amber light was on the turnpike. She thought of many things in that instant, but beneath them all, like an undercurrent, ran the knowledge that Mrs. Gay was "bearing it beautifully" behind her closed shutters. When her mind went back to the past, she remembered the elder Jonathan, who had perished in the fine silken mesh of the influence he was powerless to break. After this came the memory of the day when Janet Merryweather had flung herself on the mercy of the gentle heart, and had found it iron. And then she thought of the son, who had drifted into deceit and subterfuge because he was not strong enough to make war on a thing so helpless. He, also, had died because he dared not throw off that remorseless tyranny of weakness. Without that soft yet indomitable influence, he would never have lied in the beginning, would never have covered his faithlessness with the hypocrisy of duty.

"You have been a great comfort to her, Mr. Chamberlayne," said Kesiah, breaking the silence at last.

A low sound, half a sob, half a sigh, escaped the lawyer's lips. "A spirit like hers needs no other prop than her Creator," he replied.

"It is when one expects her to break down that she shows her wonderful fortitude," added Kesiah.

"Her consolation now is the thought that she never considered either her health or her happiness where her son was concerned," pursued the old man. "She clings pathetically to the memory that she urged him to return to Europe, and that he chose to remain a few weeks for the pleasure of hunting. Not a breath stains the purity of her utter selflessness. To witness such spiritual beauty is a divine inspiration."

For the last few hours, ever since a messenger had met him, half way on the Applegate road, with the news of Jonathan's death, he had laboured philosophically to reconcile such a tragedy with his preconceived belief that he inhabited the best of all possible worlds. Only when suffering obtruded brutally into his immediate surroundings, was it necessary for him to set about resolving the problem of existence—for, like most hereditary optimists, he did not borrow trouble from his neighbours. A famine or an earthquake at a little distance appeared to him a puerile obstacle to put forward against his belief in the perfection of the planetary scheme; but when his eyes rested upon the martyred saintliness of Mrs. Gay's expression, he was conscious that his optimism tottered for an instant, and was almost overthrown. That a just and tender Deity should inflict pain upon so lovely a being was incomprehensible to his chivalrous spirit.

"Has any one told her about Blossom?" asked Molly.

Kesiah shook her head. "Mr. Chamberlayne feels that it would be cruel. She knows so little about Jonathan's affairs that we may be able to keep his marriage from her knowledge if she leaves Jordan's Journey a few days after the funeral."

"In spite of it all I know that Jonathan hated lies," said Molly almost fiercely.

"Our first thought must be to spare her," answered the lawyer. "It was her son's endeavour always, just as it was my poor old friend Jonathan's. If you will come with me into the library," he added to Kesiah, "we will take a few minutes to look over the papers I have arranged."

They moved away, walking side by side with halting steps, as though they were crushed by age, and yet were trying to the last to keep up an appearance of activity. For a minute Molly gazed after them. Then her eyes wandered to the light that shimmered over the meadows, and descending the stone steps into the side-garden, she walked slowly through the miniature maze, where the paths were buried deep in wine-coloured leaves which had drifted from the half bared trees on the lawn. Abel was coming, she knew, and she waited for him in a stillness that seemed akin to that softly breathing plant life around her. It was the hour for which she had hungered for weeks, yet now that it had come, she could hardly recognize it for the thing she had wanted. A sudden blight had fallen over her, as though she had brought the presence of death with her out of that still chamber. Every sound was hushed into silence, every object appeared as unsubstantial as a shadow. Beyond the lawn, over the jewelled meadows, she could see the white spire of Old Church rising above the coloured foliage in the churchyard, and beyond it, the flat ashen turnpike, which had led hundreds of adventurous feet toward the great world they were seeking. She remembered that the sight of the turnpike had once made her restless; now it brought her only a promise of peace.

Turning at the sound of a step on the dead leaves, she saw that Abel had entered the garden, and was approaching her along one of the winding paths. When he reached her, he spoke quickly without taking her outstretched hand. The sun was in his eyes and he lowered them to the over-blown roses in a square of box.

"I came over earlier," he said, "but I couldn't see any one except Mr. Chamberlayne."

"He told me you would come back. That was why I waited."

For a moment he seemed to struggle for breath. Then he said quickly.

"Molly, do you believe it was an accident?"

She started and her hands shook.

"He said so at the end—otherwise—how—how could it have happened?"

"Yes, how could it have happened?" he repeated, and added after a pause, "He was a fine fellow. I always liked him."

Her tears choked her, and when she had recovered her voice, she put a question or two about Blossom—delaying, through some instinct of flight, the moment for which she had so passionately longed.

"It was all so unnecessary," she said, "that is the worst of it. It might just as easily not have happened."

"I wish I could be of some use," he answered. "Perhaps Mr. Chamberlayne has thought of something he would like me to do?"

"He is in the library. Uncle Abednego will show you."

He put out his hand, "Then good-bye, Molly," he said gently.

But at the first touch of his fingers the spell was broken, and the mystery of life, not of death, rushed over her like waves of light. She knew now that she was alive—that the indestructible desire for happiness was still in her heart. The meaning of life did not matter while the exquisite, the burning sense of its sweetness remained.

"Abel," she said with a sob, half of joy, half of sorrow, "if I go on my knees, will you forgive me?"

He had turned away, but at her voice, he stopped and looked back with the sunlight in his eyes.

"There isn't any forgiveness in love, Molly," he answered.

"Then—oh, then if I go on my knees will you love me?"

He smiled, and even his smile, she saw, had lost its boyish brightness and grown sadder.

"I'd like to see you on your knees, if I might pick you up," he said, "but, Molly, I can't. You've everything to lose and I've nothing on God's earth to give you except myself."

"But if that's all I want?"

"It isn't, darling. You may think so, but it isn't and you'd find it out. You see all this time since I've lost you, I've been learning to give you up. It's a poor love that isn't big enough to give up when the chance comes to it."

"If—if you give me up, I'll let everything go," she said passionately. "I'll not take a penny of that money. I'll stay at Old Church and live with Betsey Bottom and raise chickens. If you give me up I'll die, Abel," she finished with a sob.

At the sound of her sob, he laughed softly, and his laugh, unlike his smile, was a laugh of happiness.

"If you go to live with Betsey Bottom I'll come and get you," he answered, "but Molly, Molly, how you've tortured me. You deserve a worse punishment than raising chickens."

"That will be happiness."

"Suppose I insist that you shall draw the water and chop the wood? My beauty, your submission is adorable if it would only last!"

"Abel, how can you?"

"I can and I will, sweetheart. I might even make a miller's wife of you if it was likely that I'd ever do anything but worship you and keep you wrapped in silk. Are you very much in love at last, Molly?"

The sound of his low laugh was in her blood, and while she leaned toward him, she melted utterly, drawing him with the light of her face, with the quivering breath between her parted lips. To his eyes she was all womanhood in surrender, yet he held back still, as a man who has learned the evanescence of joy, holds back when he sees his happiness within his grasp.

"It's too late except for one thing, Molly," he said. "If it isn't everything you're offering me—if you are keeping back a particle of yourself—body or soul—it is too late. I won't take anything from you unless I take everything—unless your whole happiness as well as mine is in your giving."

Then before the look in her face, he held out his arms and stood waiting.

THE END