“If you don’t mind, dear, will you carry these sheets to Patsey for Angela’s bed,” she said.

At the time Gay had been only half in earnest when he promised to take Molly to Old Church, and he presented himself at breakfast next morning with the unspoken hope in his heart that she had changed her mind during the night.  When she met him with her hat on, he inquired facetiously if she contemplated a journey, and proceeded to make light of her response that the carriage was ordered to take them to the station.

“But we’ll starve if we go there,” he urged, “the servants are scattered, and the luncheon I got last time was a subject for bad language.”

“I’ll cook you one, Jonathan.  I can cook beautifully,” she said.

The idea amused him.  After all they could easily get back to dinner.

“I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, Molly?” he asked, smiling, and she saw that she had won.  Winning was just as easy with Jonathan as it had been with Reuben or with Abel.

It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian summer.  When they left the train and drove along the corduroy road from Applegate, the forest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and copper.  Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze.  The few belated yellow butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift pensively in the autumnal stillness.

On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for Gay was occupied with the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was thinking that but for Reuben’s death, she would never have accepted Mr. Jonathan’s legacy and parted from Abel.

“All this happened because I went along the Haunt’s Walk and not across the east meadow that April afternoon,” she thought, “but for that, Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have quarrelled.”  It was such a little thing—­only the eighth of a mile which had decided her future.  She might just as easily have turned aside if she had only suspected.  But life was like that—­you never suspected until things had happened, and the little decisions, made in the midst of your ignorance, committed you to your destiny.

The horses came out of the wood, plodding over the sandy soil, which marked the beginning of the open country.  Across the fields toward Bottom’s Ordinary, scattered groups of people were walking in twos and threes, showing like disfiguring patches in the midst of the golden rod and the life-everlasting.  Old Adam, hobbling up the path, while the horses stopped to drink at the well, touched his hat as he steadied himself with the aid of his big knotted stick.

“It’s a fine sight to see you back among us,” he said.  “If you’d come a couple of hours earlier you’d have been in time for the wedding?”