“I sometimes think it’s more than anybody can stand to go on living as I do,” said Judy, breaking the silence, “to slave an’ slave an’ never to get so much as a word of thanks for it.”

For a moment he said nothing.  Then turning he looked hard into her humid eyes, and what he saw there made him bend over and take her hand.

“Do you think I could make you happier, Judy?” he asked.

BOOK SECOND

THE CROSS-ROADS

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED

Some six months after Abel’s parting from Molly, he might have been seen crossing the lawn at Jordan’s Journey on a windy November morning, and even to a superficial observer it would have been evident that certain subtle modifications had been at work in his soul.  Disappointed love had achieved this result with a thoroughness which victorious love could not have surpassed.  Because he had lost Molly, he had resolved, in his returning sanity, that he would make of himself the man who might have won Molly had she known him in his completeness.  And in the act of resolving, his character had begun to ripen into the mellowness of maturity.

The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows in the hooded roof.  Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as a sea.  The birds, as they skimmed over this billowy expanse, appeared blown, despite their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of the west.  On the lawn at Jordan’s Journey the fallen leaves were dancing madly like a carnival in rough carousal.  Watching them it was easy to imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death—­the end to which they had moved from the young green of the bud through the opulent abundance of the summer.  The air was alive with their sighing.  They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then, whipped by a strong gust, fled in purple and wine-coloured multitudes to the shelter of the box hedges, or, rising in flight above the naked boughs, beat against the closed shutters before they came to rest against the square brick chimneys on the roof.

Beneath the trees a solitary old negro was spreading manure over the grass, hauling it in a wheelbarrow from a pile somewhere in the barnyard.  Back and forth he passed, scattering the fine manure from his spade until the wheelbarrow was empty, when he replenished it in the barnyard and returned to his sprinkling.  All the while he smoked steadily a long corncob pipe, and to watch him at his task, was to receive an impression that the hauling of manure was sufficient to fill one’s life with dignity and contentment.  The work appeared no longer a menial employment but a sober and serious share of the great problem of production.