James went to sleep, wondering how she would treat him the next day.  He never knew, for the girl shifted like a weather-cock, driven hither and yon by her love and terror like two winds.  The next day, however, solved the problem in an entirely unexpected fashion.  James, that morning after breakfast, during which Clemency had sat pale and stern behind the coffee-urn, and scarcely had noticed him, set off on a round of calls.  Doctor Gordon, to his surprise, announced his intention of making some calls himself; he said that he would take the team, and James must drive the balky mare, as the bay was to be taken to the blacksmith’s.  Gordon that morning looked worse than usual, although he evinced such unwonted energy.  He trembled like a very old man.  He ate scarcely anything, and his mouth was set hard with a desperate expression.  James wished to urge him to remain at home, but he did not dare.  Gordon, when he left the breakfast-table, proposed that James should take Clemency with him, but the girl replied curtly that she was too busy.  Gordon started on his long circuit, and James set off to make the rounds of Alton and Westover.  The mare seemed in a very favorable mood that morning.  She did not balk, and went at a good pace.  It was not until James was on his homeward road that the trouble began.  Then the mare planted her four feet at angles, in her favorite fashion, and became as immovable as a horse of bronze.  James touched her with the whip.  He was in no patient mood that morning.  Finally he lashed her.  He might as well have lashed a stone, for all the effect his blows had.  Then he got out and tried coaxing.  She did not seem to even see him.  Her great eyes had a curious introspective expression.  Then he got again into the buggy and sat still.  A sense of obstinacy as great as the animal’s came over him.  “Stand there and be d——­d!” he said.

“Go without your dinner if you want to.”  He leaned back in a corner of the buggy, and began reflecting.

His reflections were at once angry and gloomy.  He was, he told himself, tired of the situation.  He began to wonder if he ought not, for the sake of self-respect, to leave Alton and Clemency.  He wondered if a man ought to submit to be so treated, and yet he recognized Clemency’s own view of the situation, and a great wave of love and pity for the poor child swept over him.  The mare had halted in a part of the road where there were no houses, and flowering alders filled the air with their faint sweetness.  Under that sweetness, like the bass in a harmony, he could smell the pines in the woods on either hand.  He also heard their voices, like the waves of the sea.  It was a very warm day, one of those days in which Spring makes leaps toward Summer.  James felt uncomfortably heated, for the buggy was in the full glare of sunlight.  All his solace came from the fact that he himself, sitting there so quietly, was outwitting the mare by showing as great obstinacy as her own.  He knew that she