"I believe it so perfectly that I've no intention of trying," he rejoined.
"I'm not half so pretty as my mother was," she said after a pause.
Her loyalty to the unfortunate Janet touched him to sympathy. "Don't quarrel with me, Molly," he pleaded, "for I mean to be friends with you."
As he uttered the words, he was conscious of a pleasant feeling of self-approbation while his nature vibrated to the lofty impulse. This sensation was so gratifying while it lasted that his manner assumed a certain austerity as one who had determined to be virtuous at any cost. Morally he was on stilts for the moment, and the sense of elevation was as novel as it was insecure.
"I know you are a good girl, Molly," he observed staidly, "that is why I am so anxious to be your friend."
"Is there nothing more that I can do for you?" she inquired, with frigid reserve, as she took up the lantern.
"Yes, one thing—you can shake hands."
The expression of indignant surprise appeared again in her face, and she fell back a step, shaking her head stubbornly as she did so.
"I'd rather not—if you don't mind," she answered.
"But if I do mind—and I do."
"Still I'd rather not."
"Do you really dislike me as much as you dislike the miller?"
"More."
"Or the rector?"
"Oh, far more. You are a Gay."
"Yes, I am a Gay," he might have retorted, "and you, my pretty savage, are very much a Gay, also."
Swinging the lantern in her hand, she moved to the door, as if she were anxious to put an end to a conversation which had become suddenly too intimate. On the threshold she looked back, and remarked in a precise, authoritative voice:
"There are blankets in the bottom drawer if you find you haven't covering enough."
"I shall remember—there are blankets in the bottom drawer."
"Patsey will bring hot water at eight and Uncle Abednego will give you breakfast in the dining-room."
"Then I'm not to have it with you?"
"With me? Oh, I live with grandfather. I never come to the big house except when Mrs. Gay is in town."
"Do you see nothing, then, of my mother when she is at home?"
"Sometimes I help her to make raspberry vinegar or preserves. If you hear a noise in the night it is only the acorns dropping on the roof. There are so many oaks. Good night, Mr. Jonathan."
"Good night," he returned, "I wish you'd shake hands,"—but she had vanished.
The room was cosy and warm now—and flinging himself into a chair with deep arms that stood on the hearth, he lit his cigar and sipped drowsily the glass of brandy she had left on a silver tray on the table. The ceiling was ridiculously high—what a waste of good bricks and mortar!—the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out of the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped with prim folds of damask, and the coverlet was of some quaint crocheted work that hung in fringed ends to the floor. Here again from the threadbare velvet carpet the blue poppies stared back at him.
An acorn dropped on the roof, and in spite of Molly's warning, he started and glanced toward the window, where a frosted pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers—of the fingers of pretty Janet Merryweather—some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted before her birth? Turning to the books on the table, he opened one and a yellowed fragment of paper fluttered to the floor at his feet. When he stooped after it, he saw that there was a single word on it traced faintly in his uncle's hand: "To-morrow."
And then, being a person whose imagination dealt with the obvious, he undressed, blew out the light, and fell peacefully asleep to the dropping of acorns.
CHAPTER IV
THE REVERCOMBS
On the morning after the meeting at Bottom's Ordinary, Abel Revercomb came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which ran above a silver stream known as Sycamore Creek. The grist-mill, a primitive log building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid-way of the stream and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above. The old wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook, where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below. Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land, where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran to the luminous band of marshes on the far horizon.
From the open door before which the miller was standing, there came the clatter of breakfast dishes and the sound of Scripture text quoted in the voice of his mother. Above his head several strings of red pepper hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.
"The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.
"I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with a frown—for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy, when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her. Her parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the quality of their moral fibre. All her life she had laboured to make people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed and resentful family.
"Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in, Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur laid right by yo' plate."
"For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need it."
"I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the feelin'," rejoined Sarah grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you, you'll come and swallow it right down."
"I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick, dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny. A certain tenacity—a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined, he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial submission which was embodied