Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat at his side.

It was two o’clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill, and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture.  As he crossed the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a night of love.

CHAPTER V

THE SHAPING OF MOLLY

Leaning back in the uncomfortable plush-covered chair in the train to Richmond, Molly watched the flat landscape glide past, while she thought a little wistfully of the morning she had made this same trip dressed in one of Mrs. Gay’s gowns.  On her knees Mrs. Gay’s canary, extinguished beneath the black silk cover to his cage, uttered from time to time a feeble pipe of inquiry, and on the rack above her head Mrs. Gay’s tea basket rattled loudly in a sudden lurch of the train.  Since the hour in which she had left the overseer’s cottage and moved into the “big house” at Jordan’s Journey, the appealing little lady had been the dominant influence in her life—­an influence so soft and yet so overpowering that she had at times a sensation of being smothered in scented swansdown.  For several months after leaving Old Church her education had absorbed her energies, and she had found time merely to gasp occasionally in the oppressive sweetness of the atmosphere which Mrs. Gay’s personality diffused.  Everything was strange then, and her desire for strangeness, for unfamiliar impressions, had amounted to a passion.  She had been very anxious, too, very much afraid lest she should make a mistake.  When she had entered the hotel dining-room in New York she had felt as if she were walking on ploughed ground, and the red velvet carpet had seemed to rise and sink under her feet.  That first night had been exquisite torture to her, and so, she surmised through some intuitive understanding, had it been to Kesiah.  For weeks after that time of embarrassment, she had watched herself carefully—­watched every instant—­and in the end she had triumphed.  With her growing ease, her old impulsiveness had returned to her, and with the wonderful adaptability of the Southern woman, she had soon ceased to feel a sense of discomfort in her changed surroundings.  The instinct of class she had never had, and this lack of social reverence had helped her not a little in her ascent of the ladder.  It is difficult to suffer from a distinction which one does not admit—­and her perfect unconsciousness of inferiority to Mrs. Gay had placed her, without her being aware of it, in the position of an equal.