"Oh, Molly, Molly, I'll not give you up! Some day you'll see things differently."
"Never—never. Now, I've warned you and it isn't my fault if you keep on after this."
"But you do like me a little, haven't you said so?"
Her frown deepened.
"Yes, I do like you—a little."
"Then I'll keep on hoping, anyhow."
Her smile came back, but this time it had grown mocking.
"No, you mustn't hope," she answered, "at least," she corrected provokingly, "you mustn't hope—too hard."
"I'll hope as hard as the devil, darling—and, Molly, if you marry me, you know, you won't have to live with my mother."
"I like that, even though I'm not going to marry you."
"Come here," he drew her toward the door, "and I'll show you where our house will stand. Do you see that green rise of ground over the meadow?"
"Yes, I see it," her tone was gentler.
"I've chosen that site for a home," he went on, "and I'm saving a good strip of pine—you can see it over there against the horizon. I've half a mind to take down my axe and cut down the biggest of the trees this afternoon!"
If his ardour touched her there was no sign of it in the movement with which she withdrew herself from his grasp.
"You'd better finish your grinding. There isn't the least bit of a hurry," she returned with a smile.
"If you'll go with me, Molly, you may take your choice and I'll cut the tree down for you."
"But I can't, Abel, because I've promised Mr. Mullen to visit his mother."
The glow faded from his eyes and a look like that of an animal under the lash took its place.
"Come with me, not with him, Molly, you owe me that much," he entreated.
"But he's such a good man, and he preaches such beautiful sermons."
"He does—I know he does, but I love you a thousand times better."
"Oh, he loves me because I am pretty and hard to win—just as you do," she retorted. "If I lost my hair or my teeth how many of you, do you think, would care for me to-morrow?"
"I should—before God I'd love you just as I do now," he answered with passion.
A half mocking, half tender sound broke from her lips.
"Then why don't you—every one of you, fall head over ears in love with
Judy Hatch?" she inquired.
"I don't because I loved you first, and I can't change, however badly you treat me. I'm sometimes tempted to think, Molly, that mother is right, and you are possessed of a devil."
"Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring home to her."
The softness had gone out of her voice at the mention of Sarah's name, and she had grown defiant and reckless.
"I don't think you are just to my mother, Molly," he said after a moment, "she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is most often for your good."
"I suppose it was for my mother's good that she kept her from going to church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?"
"That's an old story—you were only a month old. Can't you forget it?"
"I'll never forget it—not even at the Day of Judgment. I don't care how
I'm punished."
Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture.
"It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.
"If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen."
He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill.
For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?"
"I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."
"I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly."
"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?"
"I shouldn't have cared—it would have been better than your expression at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to."
"Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you."
"I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away from
him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow,
"I've seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, and
I've hated them for it."
"What I can't understand," he pursued, not without bitterness, "is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn't married should put up with it for an instant?"
At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough.
"The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look in a man's face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose."
"I know it isn't you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet—"
She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.
"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel," she said.
A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to