“That’s the way I intend to go about the work of my mill,” thought Abel, as he watched him.  “When you do it like that it really makes very little difference what you are doing.  It all comes to good.”  A minute before his thought had been on the new roller mill he had recently bought and was now working in his primitive little building, which he had slightly remodelled.  The next thing to go, he supposed, would be the old wooden wheel, with its brilliant enamel of moss, and within five years he hoped to complete the reconstruction of his machinery on lines that were scientific rather than picturesque.  His water power was good, and by the time he could afford an entire modern equipment, he would probably have all the grain at his door that he was ready to handle.  Then he began to wonder, as he had often done of late, if the work of the farm and the mill might be left safely to Abner and Archie when he went up to Richmond to the General Assembly, in the event of his future election?  Already he had achieved a modest local fame as a speaker—­for his voice expressed the gradual political awakening of his class.  Though he was in advance of his age, it was evident, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was moving in the direction whither lagging progress was bound.  In the last eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists, and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in milk.  That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories, but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a strong religious conviction, by a belief in the determining power of a practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of his century—­the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a social regeneration that would follow an enlightened and instructed proletariat.  Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church.  Since no man thinketh to himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the invertebrate to the vertebrate.  His mind being open, ideas had entered, and having entered, they proceeded immediately to take active possession.  He was serving a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as ardently as a lover serves his mistress.

As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but enskied.  Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the pain.  Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from his mind.  Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her “a light woman,” he had come perilously near the feeling that she had grazed the skirts of impropriety with a recklessness which no sober minded son of Sarah Revercomb could countenance for a minute.