As he turned away from her into the crowd of silver willows beside the brook, she stood looking after him with the abstracted gaze of one who dwells not in the world of objects, but in the exalted realm of visions.

CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON

As Abel crossed the poplar log he said to himself, “I shall not think of Her again”; when he reached the end of the willows he said, “I must not think of Her again”; and at the beginning of the kitchen garden, he changed this to, “I will not think of Her again.”

The scent of hyacinths, which floated from a row blooming on either side of the white paling gate, whipped his senses into revolt, and he quickened his steps in a vain effort to escape from the tormenting fragrance.  Yet even while he fled from his pain he knew in his heart that he did not desire the strength to turn and renounce it—­that to banish the image of Molly from his thoughts was to drive the bloom from the meadow, the perfume from the air, the sunlight from the orchard.  Spring became as desolate as winter when it was robbed of the thought of her.

By the house a late pear-tree was in blossom, and the sunshine, falling obliquely across it, awoke a white fire in its branches, as if piles of new fallen snow had warmed suddenly to a reflected flame.  Beneath it Sarah Revercomb was sowing portulaca seeds in a rockery she had made over a decaying stump.  Her back was strained with bending, but not once had she stopped to gaze at the glorified pear-tree overhead.  All her life she had distinguished carefully between the aristocracy and the common herd of blossoms, and not all the magic gilding of the spring sunshine could delude her into regarding the useful product of a fruit-tree as a flower.

“I don’t see why you want to go wearin’ yo’ Sunday clothes every day, Abel,” she observed as he was about to pass her.

“Why shouldn’t I?” he retorted with the defiance of despair.

Something in his voice caused the woman who had borne him to raise herself from her stooping posture, and stare at him with an amazed and incredulous expression, as if she were asking herself when and where she could have given him birth.  In her mental vision, which saw only one thing at a time, but saw that thing with great distinctness, the idea of love slowly presented itself as the cause of such a reversal of the natural order as a Sunday suit on week days.  Her conceptions of life were derived so closely from facts, or from a logic as inexorable as facts, that she was conscious of a baffled and exasperated sensation when she was confronted by anything intangible which would not, as she put it in her own mind, “get out of her way.”  It was natural enough, she knew, that a material object or condition should possess the power to block one’s progress or even to change the normal current of one’s existence.