He liked the honest sound of the words, and he did not know that before uttering them she had debated in her heart whether it was worth while to marry Abel since she could not marry Mr. Mullen.  Marriage, having few illusions for her, possessed, perhaps for that reason, the greater practical value.  She was unhappy with her stepmother in a negative way, but so impervious had she become to casual annoyances, that she hardly weighed the disadvantages of her home against the probable relinquishment of Mrs. Mullen’s washing day after her marriage to Abel.  Her soul was crushed like a trapped creature in the iron grip of a hopeless passion, and her insensibility to the lesser troubles of life was but the insensibility of such a creature to the stings of the insects swarming around its head.  The outcome of her drive with Abel aroused only a dull curiosity in her mind.  Some years ago, in the days before Mr. Mullen, she would probably have fallen a helpless victim to the miller had his eyes wandered for an instant in her direction.  But those days and that probability were now over forever.

Unfortunately, however, it is not given to a man to look into the soul of a woman except through the inscrutable veil of his own personality.  Had Abel pierced that purple calico dress and witnessed the pathetic struggle in Judy’s bosom, his next words would hardly have been uttered.

“I wish I could do something to make you happier, Judy.”

She looked at him with mysterious, brooding eyes, and he was conscious again of the attraction, as subtile and as penetrating as a perfume, which she exhaled in the stillness, and which vanished as soon as she broke the quivering intensity of the silence.  That this attraction was merely the unconscious vibration of her passion for another man, which shed its essence in solitude as naturally as a flower sheds its scent, did not occur to him.  Without his newly awakened pity it could not have moved him.  With it he felt that he was powerless to resist its appeal.

“Why shouldn’t I be good to you, Judy?” he repeated.

Tears overflowed her eyes at his words.  Looking at her, he saw her not as she was, but as he desired that she should be; and this desire, he knew, sprang from his loneliness and from his need of giving sympathy to some one outside of himself.  The illusion that surrounded her bore no resemblance to the illusion of love—­yet it was akin to it in the swiftness and the completeness with which it was born.  If any one had told him an hour ago that he was on the verge of marriage to Judy, he would have scoffed at the idea—­he who was the heartbroken lover of Molly!  Yet this sudden protecting pity was so strong that he found himself playing with the thought of marriage, as one plays in lofty moments with the idea of a not altogether unpleasant self-abnegation.  He did not love Judy, but he was conscious of an overwhelming desire to make Judy happy—­and like all desires which are conceived in a fog of uncertainty, its ultimate form depended less upon himself than it did upon the outward pressure of circumstances.