“Was Mr. Mullen at your house to-day, Abel?” she asked suddenly, turning her face from the lamp.

“Yes, he comes to see Blossom now, but she doesn’t appear to care for him.  I thought she did once, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I thought she did, but that was when he was in love with Molly, wasn’t it?”

For an instant he gazed at the bit of braid, as though his soul were intent upon unravelling the intricate pattern.

“I wonder whether it is that we get a thing when we stop wanting it or that we merely stop wanting it when we get it?” he demanded passionately of fate.

But Judy had no mind for dubious philosophies.  The thing she wanted she knew she should never get and she knew as well that, in all likelihood, she should never stop wanting it.  Only a passionate soul in a commonplace body could have squandered itself with such superb prodigality.

“I don’t know,” she answered wearily, “I’ve never noticed much either what people get or what they want.”

“Well, Blossom wanted Mr. Mullen once and now he wants Blossom.  I wish mother didn’t have so poor an opinion of him.”

She flushed and looked up quickly, for in her heart she felt that she hated Sarah Revercomb.  A disgust for her coming marriage swept over her.  Then she told herself stubbornly that everybody married sooner or later, and that anyway her stepmother would never forgive her if she broke off with Abel.

“She doesn’t even go to his church.  I don’t see what right she has to find fault with him,” she said.

“That’s her way, you know.  You can’t make her over.  She pretends he doesn’t know his Scripture and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarrass him.  Yesterday she told him she couldn’t call to mind the difference in cubits between the length and the breadth of Solomon’s temple, and would he please save her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out?”

“Does she want him to stop coming?” inquired Judy, breathlessly.

“I don’t know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don’t you?”

“Don’t I?” she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor, where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern.  As they were gathering them up, their heads touched by accident, and he kissed her gravely.  For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his brilliant eyes, “Abel is really very handsome, after all.”  Then folding her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed the basket on a shelf between a bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of pressed flowers under a glass case.  “He couldn’t have got anybody to fill in those holes better,” she said to herself, and the reflection was not without a balm for her aching heart.