His hand was still on her shoulder, when he felt her start back from his grasp, and, turning quickly in the direction of her glance, he saw the miller looking at them from the thicket on the opposite side of the brook.  The anger in Abel’s face had distorted his handsome features until they appeared swollen as if from drink, and for a single instant Gay imagined that it was indeed whisky and not passion that had wrought so brutal a change in him.

“So you’ve made a fool of me, too, Molly?” he said when he had swung over the stream and stood facing her.

“You’re all wrong, Revercomb,” began Gay, and stopped the next instant, because Molly’s hand had shot out to silence him.

“Will you be quiet?” she flung at him impatiently; and then fixing her eyes on Abel, she waited silently for him to finish his speech.  That her lover’s fiery temper had aroused her own, Gay realized as soon as he turned to her.  Her face was pale, but her eyes blazed and never had he felt so strongly the tie of blood that united them as he did while she stood there waiting for Abel’s accusations with a gesture which appeared to fling them back in disdain.

“I might have known ’twas all fool’s play with you—­I might have known you had flirted too much to settle down to an honest love,” said Abel, breathing hard between his word as if each one were torn from him with a physical wrench at his heart.  In losing his self-possession he had lost his judgment as well, and, grasping something of his love from the sincerity of his emotion, Gay made another ineffectual effort to present the situation in a fairer light.

“If you would only listen, my good fellow—­if you would only let me explain things—–­” he began.

“Will you be quiet?” said Molly a second time, and then facing him passionately she threw him a gesture of dismissal.  “If you want to please me, you will go.”

“And leave you alone with him?”

She laughed.  “Do you think I’m afraid of an angry man, or that I’ve never seen one before?”

With that he obeyed her, turning from time to time on his way over the meadow to make sure that she did not need his support.  In spite of the utter unreasonableness of the affair, in some unaccountable way his sympathies were on the side of the miller.  The fellow was a boor, of course, but, by Jove! he was a magnificent boor.  It had been long since Gay had seen such an outburst of primitive feeling—­long since he had come so close to the good red earth on which we walk and of which we are made.

“You’re out of your head, Abel,” said Molly—­Gay turned away from them—­and the tone in which she spoke was hardly calculated to bring him back to the place he had deserted.  “You will say things you’ll regret, but I’ll never forgive.”

“I’m sick of your eternal forgiveness,” he retorted.  “I’ve been forgiven every time you got into a temper, and I suppose I’ll be forgiven next every time you are kissed.”  The “rousing” which had threatened every Revercomb was upon him at last.