Such things had happened a dozen times at least in her limited experience.  But when a mere emotion assumed the importance and the reality of a solid body, she was seized by the indignant astonishment with which a mathematician might regard the differential calculus if it ceased suddenly to behave as he expected it to do.  She had always controlled her own feeling with severity, and it was beyond the power of her imagination to conceive a possible excuse—­unless it was a disordered liver—­for another person’s inability to do the same.  Besides, as she had often asked herself, what was the use of not controlling your feelings when you came to think about it?

“Thar ain’t a bit of use in yo’ goin’ on this way over that girl, Abel,” she said presently, as an annotation to his last remark, “you’d better jest start along about yo’ work, an’ put her right straight out of yo’ mind.  I al’ays knew thar warn’t a particle of sense in it.”

There was sound reason in her advice, and he did not attempt to dispute it.  The unfortunate part was, however, that in the very soundness of her reason lay its point of offence.  Philosophy was dealing again in her high handed fashion with emotion, and emotion, in its turn, was treating philosophy with an absence of that respectful consideration to which she was entitled.  Abel knew quite as well as Sarah that there wasn’t “a particle of sense” in his thinking of Molly; but the possession of this knowledge did not interfere in the least with either the intensity or the persistence of his thought of her.  His mind seemed to have as much control over the passion that raged in his heart as an admonishing apostle of peace has over a mob that is headed toward destruction.  At the moment he felt that the last straw—­the one burden more that he could not bear—­was to be told to follow what he admitted to be the only clear and rational course.  Turning away from her without a reply, he rushed through the open gate and across the road and the poplar log into the friendly shelter of his mill.

“What he needs is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair,” thought Sarah as she looked after him.  Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her rockery.

In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would beat in vain against its impregnable barrier.  But the books, like Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of philosophy.  He could get no assistance from them, because they only told him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and this did not help him.  They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of unanimity, that human