BOOK SECOND

     The cross-roads

Chapter

     I. In which Youth Shows a Little Seasoned
     II.  The Desire of the Moth
     III Abel Hears Gossip and Sees a Vision
     IV.  His Day of Freedom
     V. The Shaping of Molly
     VI.  In Which Hearts Go Astray
     VII.  A New Beginning to an Old Tragedy
     VIII.  A Great Passion in a Humble Place
     IX.  A Meeting in the Pasture
     X. Tangled Threads
     XI.  The Ride to Piping Tree
     XII.  One of Love’s Victims
     XIII.  What Life Teaches
     XIV.  The Turn of the Wheel
     XV.  Gay Discovers Himself
     XVI.  The End

     Author’s Note:  The scene of this story is not the
     place of the same name in Virginia.

BOOK FIRST

JORDAN’S JOURNEY

THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH

CHAPTER I

AT BOTTOM’S ORDINARY

It was past four o’clock on a sunny October day, when a stranger, who had ridden over the “corduroy” road between Applegate and Old Church, dismounted near the cross-roads before the small public house known to its frequenters as Bottom’s Ordinary.  Standing where the three roads meet at the old turnpike-gate of the county, the square brick building, which had declined through several generations from a chapel into a tavern, had grown at last to resemble the smeared face of a clown under a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry.  Originally covered with stucco, the walls had peeled year by year until the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder.  Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring.  After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of the wayfarer to the bar beneath.  This cheerful room which sprouted, like some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days to attract a larger congregation of the righteous than had ever stood up to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship.  Good and bad prospects were weighed here, weddings discussed, births and deaths recorded in ever-green memories, and here, also, were reputations demolished and the owners of them hustled with scant ceremony away to perdition.