“Oh, grandma! how can you? who ever heard of anybody taking castor oil on their wedding day?”

“Well, thar’s a lot of ’em that would better,” rejoined Sarah in her tart manner.  The perfection of Mr. Mullen’s behaviour in church combined with her forgetfulness to make up the feather bed had destroyed her day, and her irritation expressed itself as usual in a moral revolt from her surroundings.  “To think of makin’ all this fuss about that pop-eyed Judy Hatch,” she thought, and a minute later she said aloud, “Thar they are now; Blossom, you take Judy upstairs to her room an’ I’ll see after Abel.  It ain’t any use contradictin’ me.  He’s in for a bilious spell just as sure as you are born.”  She spoke irritably, for her anxiety about Abel’s liver covered a deeper disquietude, and she was battling with all the obstinacy of the Hawtreys against the acknowledgment that the ailment she was preparing to dose with drugs was a simple malady of the soul.  In her moral universe, sin and virtue were two separate entities, as easily distinguished on the surface as any other phenomena.  That a mere feeling, not produced by a disordered liver, could make a man wear that drawn and desperate look in his face, appeared to her both unnatural and reprehensible.

But Abel did not appear, though Sarah awaited his entrance with a bottle in her hand.  As soon as he had turned his mare out to pasture, he crossed the road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel, watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead.  He knew how a man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in a moment of madness.  Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him—­why he had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding—­he could no more explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the absurdities in a nightmare.  It was all a part of the terrible and yet useful perversity of life—­of the perversity that enables a human being to pass from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his course to reflect on his folly.

In front of him was the vivid green rise in the meadow, which showed like a burst of spring in the midst of the November landscape.  Beyond it, the pines were etched in sharp outlines on the bright blue sky, where a buzzard was sailing slowly in search of food.  The weather was so perfect that the colours of the fields and the sky borrowed the intense and unreal look of objects seen in a crystal.

“Well, it’s over and done,” said Abel to himself; “it’s over and done and I’m glad of it.”  It seemed to him while he spoke that it was his life, not his marriage, to which he alluded—­that he had taken the final, the irremediable step, and there was nothing to come afterwards.  The uncertainty and the suspense were at an end, for the clanging of the prison doors behind him was still in his ears.  To-morrow would be like yesterday, the next year would be like the last.  Forgetting his political ambition, he told