He went on, swinging with an easy stride between the hedges of box, while Abel, passing the right wing in obedience to the directions, found Molly walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops.  The “side-garden” was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy.  Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible.  Yet the place was exquisite still.  Spring had passed over it with her magical touch, and she had decorated the spot she could no longer restore.  The scent of box filled the air, and little new green leaves had put out on the dusky windings of the maze.

As Abel approached, Molly was moving slowly away from him, her long black skirt, which had been made to fit Mrs. Gay, trailing over the snowdrops in the path.  When she turned at the end of the walk, there was the faintest hesitancy in her manner before she came forward with a smile and an outstretched hand.  In some subtle way she had changed—­he felt it before she reached him—­before she uttered a word.  He had never seen her in a long dress until to-day; and in putting on Mrs. Gay’s gown she seemed to have clothed herself in that lady’s appealing and pensive manner.  The black skirt, flowing between them on the grass, divided them more completely than the memory of their quarrel.  He was chilled because it made her appear reserved and distant; she was embarrassed because she had not yet learned to walk in a train, and while it pleased and flattered her with a sense of dignity, it also caused her to feel awkward and unnatural in her movements, as if she were not “playing up” successfully to the part that had been assigned her.  She had learned a good deal in three days, and she was still a little confused by the endeavour to understand all of her lessons.  Sincere as her sorrow was for Reuben, her youth and a certain quickness of observation had kept her mindful of every change through which she had passed, of every detail which distinguished life at the “big house” from life in the overseer’s cottage.  She had learned, for instance, the necessity, in such circumstances, of eating as if it were an utterly indifferent matter, and yet of coming to one’s meals dressed as elaborately as if one were on one’s way to church.  Kesiah had taught her much; but from Gay, with his abundant kindliness, his self-possession, his good clothes, she had learned incomparably more.  Kesiah had shown her the external differences in “things,” while Gay had opened her eyes to the external differences that might count in men.  Until she knew Gay she had believed that the cultivation of one’s appearance was a matter that concerned women alone.  Now, when moved by some unfortunate impulse of respect for her mourning, Abel showed himself before her in his Sunday clothes, she was conscious of a shock which she would never have felt in the old days in the overseer’s cottage.  In his working dress, with his fine throat bared by his blue shirt, there was a splendid vitality about her lover beside which Jonathan appeared flabby and over-weighted with flesh.  But dressed in imitation of the work of Gay’s London tailor, the miller lost the distinction which nature had given him without acquiring the one conferred by society.