“When did it happen?  How long have you known it?”

But she was on her guard now, wrapped in that soft, pale reticence which was the spiritual aspect of her beauty.

“It may have been only one of the darkies’ stories.  I didn’t pay much attention to it,” she answered, and busied herself about the geraniums in the window.

“Oh, you can’t put any faith in the darkies’ tales,” rejoined Abel, and after leaving a message with his mother for a farmer with whom he had an appointment, he hastened out of the house and over the fields in the direction of Reuben Merryweather’s cottage.  Here, where he had expected to find Molly, Kesiah met him, with some long black things over her arm, and a frown of anxious sympathy on her face.

“The child is broken-hearted,” she said with dignity, for a funeral was one of the few occasions upon which she felt that she appeared to advantage.  “I don’t think she can see you—­but I’ll go in and ask, if you wish it.”

She went in, returning a minute later, with the black things still over her arm, and a deeper frown on her forehead.

“No—­I’m sorry, but she doesn’t wish to see any one.  You know, the old hound died the same night, and that has added to her sorrow.”

“Perhaps if I come back later?”

“Perhaps; I am not sure.  As soon as the funeral is over she will come to us.  You have heard, I suppose, of the change in—­in her circumstances?”

“Then it is true?  I heard it, but I didn’t believe it.”

Molly had fled suddenly into remoteness—­not Reuben’s death, but Mr. Jonathan’s “provision,” had swept her away from him.  Like other mortals in other crises of experience, she was aware of a helpless, a rebellious, realization of the power, not of fate, but of money.  No other accident of fortune could have detached her so completely from the surroundings in which he had known her.  Though he told himself that to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid brutality of soul, he revolted the next instant from the idea that his love should demand so great a sacrifice.  Like the majority of men who have risen to comparative comfort out of bitter poverty, he had at the same time a profound contempt and an inordinate respect for the tangible fact of money—­a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the symbol.  Sarah’s hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in his character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to think lightly of renouncing—­or of inviting another to renounce—­an income of ten thousand dollars a year. He might dream that love would bring happiness, but she was reasonably assured that money would bring comfort.  Between the dream and the assurance there would have been, in Sarah’s mind at least, small room left for choice.  He had known few women, and for one dreadful minute he asked himself, passionately, if Molly and his mother could be alike?