“If I did it, I don’t believe I’d ever regret it,” was her amazing rejoinder.

Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge.

“You’re talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it,” he said.  “If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you’d be sorry before you got up to the altar.”

“I’m not going back there to marry him,” she persisted stubbornly, “but I don’t’ believe if I were to do it, I’d ever regret it.”

“You think you’d be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?”

“I like raising chickens.”

“And you’d expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would sacrifice—­for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?”

“I don’t care about the world,” she replied, sticking, he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, “and people seem to me just the same everywhere.”

“The same?” he repeated, “do you actually mean that you can’t see any difference?”

“No difference that matters.  It’s all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about.  Why, I’d rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks.  If I’ve got to hear about a single subject I’d rather it would be crops than stocks—­they seem more human, somehow.”

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, under his breath, “what’s got into you to-night, Molly?  I honestly believe you’ve begun to idealize the miller now you’ve been away from him.  He’s a handsome fellow; you don’t see his physical match in a day, I’m willing to admit, but if you went back again you’d be surprised to find how—­well, how rustic he would appear to you.”

The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden droop of her lashes.

“He’s better than any one I’ve seen anywhere,” she replied, “he’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s kinder.  I’m not good enough to marry him, and I know it.”

For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had never indulged in verbal excesses.  Then he said, coldly; “So you’re working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb.  My dear child, if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is.  Nothing could be more absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in order to marry a poor man.”  The idea of her committing such folly was intensely distressing to him.  His judgment was now in the ascendant, and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise superior to reason.

“I don’t care how poor he is,” said Molly passionately, for her rational part was plainly not in the ascendant.  “Nobody ever thought about his being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money.  He was honestly born and I wasn’t, yet he didn’t care.  He was big and splendid and I was little and mean, that was the matter!”