“Well, as a matter of fact it is time enough for you to forgive me when I ask you to,” she returned.

“You needn’t ask.  It’s too much this time, and I’ll be damned before I will do it.”

Bending over a grey skeleton of last year’s golden-rod, she caressed it gently, without breaking its ghostly bloom.  Years afterward, when she had forgotten every word he uttered, she could still see that dried spray of golden-rod growing against the April sky—­she could still hear a bluebird that sang three short notes and stopped in the willows.  In the quiet air their anger seemed to rush together as she had sometimes thought their love had rushed to a meeting.

“You have neither the right to forgive me nor to judge me,” she said.  “Do you think I care what a man imagines of me who believes a thing against me as easily as you do.  If you went on your knees to me now I should never explain—­and if I chose to kiss every man in the county,” she concluded in an outburst of passion, “you have nothing to do with it!”

“Explain?  How can a girl explain a man’s kissing her, except by saying she let him do it?”

“I did let him do it,” she gasped.

For an instant they gazed at each other in an anger more violent in its manifestation than their love had been.  An observer, noticing them for the first time, would have concluded that they had hated each other for years, not that they had been lovers only a few minutes before.  Nature, having wearied of her play, was destroying her playthings.

“I would marry no man on earth who wouldn’t believe me in spite of that—­and everything else,” she said.

“Do you expect a man to believe you in spite of his eyes?”

“Eyes, ears—­everything!  Do you think I’d have turned on you like that before I had heard you?”

A sob, not of pity, but of rage, burst from her lips, and the sound sobered him more completely than her accusations had done.  Her temper he could withstand, but that little childish sob, bitten back almost before it escaped, brought him again on his knees to her.

“I can’t understand—­oh, Molly, don’t you see I am in torment?” he cried.

But the veil of softness was gone now, and the cruelty that is bound up in some inexplicable way in all violent emotion—­even in the emotion of love—­showed itself on the surface.

“Then stay there, for you’ve made it for yourself,” she answered, and turned away from him.  As his voice called her again, she broke into a run, flying before him over the green meadow until she reached the lawn of Jordan’s Journey, and his pursuit ended.  Then, hurrying through the orchard and up the flagged walk, she ascended the steps, and bent over Reuben in his chair.

“Grandfather, I am back.  Are you asleep?”

The robin that had flown from the railing at her approach swung on the bough of an apple-tree and regarded her with attention.