“Can’t you tell me what it is, Molly?”

She shook her head.  Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it was, it had obviously enriched her beauty.

“Tell me, little girl,” he repeated and leaned closer.  There had always been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, “I want to go back to find out if Abel still loves me!  I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring.  This suspense is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he means to me.”

This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely murmured: 

“I can’t, Jonathan, you would never understand.”  Her whole being was vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide experience with the passion, she knew that he would not comprehend what she meant by the word.  It wasn’t his kind of love in the least that she wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the blaze of a prairie fire.  “It’s just a feeling,” she added, helplessly.  “You don’t have feelings, I suppose?”

“Don’t I?” he echoed.  “Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!”

“While they last—­but they don’t last, you know, they have their seasons.  That’s the curse of them, or the charm.  If they only lasted earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn’t it?”

But generalizations had no further attraction for her.  Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes.

“All the same I want to go,” she repeated obstinately.

Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache.

“Molly,” he asked, “have you been thinking again about the miller?”

“How absurd!  What put that into your head?” she retorted indignantly.

The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her.  What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry!

“Well, I’m glad you haven’t—­because, you know, really it wouldn’t do,” he answered.

“What wouldn’t do?”

“Your marrying a Revercomb—­it wouldn’t do in the least.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“You can see that for yourself, can’t you?  You’ve come entirely out of that life and you couldn’t go back to it.”

“I don’t see why I couldn’t if I wanted to?” she threw out at him with sudden violence.

Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn’t agree that she would never become exactly a lady.  Not with that high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands!

“Well, in the first place, I don’t believe you’d ever want to,” he said calmly, “and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you’d regret it in ten minutes.”