His very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities.  Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.  What Abel had never divined was that Molly, like himself, might approach the angelic in one mood and fall short of the merely human in another—­that she, also, was capable of moments of sublimation and of hours of recusancy.  There were the ashes of a poet in her soul as in his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the crucible for purifying flames.

But it was six months ago that he had condemned her, and since then the subtle modifications had worked in his habit of thought.  As the soreness passed from his heart, he had nursed the scar much as a crusader might have cherished a wound out of the Holy Wars.  From the actual conditions of life in which he had loved her, he now beheld her caught up into the zone of ideal and impossible beauty.  Through the outer covering of her flesh he could see her soul shine, as the stars shone through the web of purple twilight on the marshes.  From his earlier craving for possession, his love had grown, through frustration and disappointment, into a simpler passion for service.

“Well, one has to find out things,” he said to himself on this November morning, while he watched the old negro at his work.  Some red leaves whirled into his face, and the wind, lifting the dark hair from his forehead, showed three heavy furrows between his knitted brows.  He appeared a little older, a little braver, a little wiser, yet there was about him still the look of superb physical vitality which had been the result of a youth spent in the open fields.

“Howdy, Uncle Boaz,” he said to the old negro, who approached with his wheelbarrow.  “Your folks have all gone away for good haven’t they?”

“Hit looks dat ar way, marster, hit sutney do look dat ar way.”

“Well, you keep good grass here all the same.”

“Dar ain’ but one way ter do hit, suh, en dat’s ter dung hit,” replied Uncle Boaz, and he remarked a minute afterwards, as he put down the lowered handles of the wheel barrow, and stood prodding the ashes in his pipe, “I’se gwinter vote fur you, Marse Abel, I sholy is—–­”

“Thank you, Uncle Boaz!”

“En I’se got a sack er co’n I’d be moughty bleeged ter git ground up fur hominy meal—–­”

With a laugh Abel passed on through the side-garden, and entered the leafless shrubbery that bordered the Haunt’s Walk.  The old negro had disturbed his dream, which had been of Molly in her red stockings, with the red ribbon binding her curls.  Then he thought of Spot, the aged hound—­“That dog must have lived to be seventeen years old,” he said aloud in the effort to smother the sharp pang at his heart, “I remember how fond old Reuben was of him even as a puppy.  He would never let