His business in Applegate, which included a careful matching of Judy’s braid, took up the entire morning; and it was dinner time before he turned back to the little inn, known as Raleigh’s Tavern, at which the farmers usually stopped for meals.  Here, after washing his hands in a basin on the back porch, he hastily smoothed his hair, and passed into the small paved court in front of the tavern.  As he approached the doorway, the figure of a young woman in a black dress, which he felt instinctively did not “belong” to Applegate, came down the short steps, and paused an instant to caress a large dog that was lying in the sunshine near the entrance.  The next minute, while he fell back, hat in hand, behind a pile of boxes in the yard, he heard his name called in a familiar voice, and lifting his eyes found himself face to face with Molly.

“Abel, aren’t you going to speak to me?” she asked, and moving a step toward him, held out both hands with an impulsive gesture.

As his hand met hers, he withdrew it quickly as though he were stung by the touch of her soft fingers.  Every nerve in his body leaped suddenly to life, and the moment was so vivid while he faced her, that he felt half convinced that all the long months since their parting had dissolved in shadows.  The border line between the dream and actuality was obliterated.  It seemed to him not only impossible, but absurd that he should ever have believed himself engaged to Judy Hatch—­that he should be going to marry her to-morrow!  All that side of his life had no closer relation to his real self than it had to the self of old Adam Doolittle.  While he had planned it he had been a corpse not a living man, but at the sound of Molly’s voice, at the clasp of her fingers, at the touching, expectant brightness in her eyes, the resurrection had happened.  Judy was a corpse preparing to wed a corpse that had become alive—­and the mating of death with life was abhorrent to him in his illumination.

“We are on our way to Richmond,” explained Molly, very gently, “and we are waiting to change trains.  Oh, Abel, I have wanted so much to see you!”

It was the old Molly, in truth—­Molly in her softest, in her most dangerous, in her divinest mood.  While he gazed at her he could make no answer because an emotion that was half self-reproach, half furious longing, choked back his words, and had he opened his lips it would have been to utter some foolish inarticulate arraignment of destiny.  In the confusion of his senses, he did not notice that she had altered, but the next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate, like a tinted egg-shell he had once seen, and that her eyes in consequence were wondrously, were almost startlingly, large.  All that he was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look, was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart.

CHAPTER IV