Without replying she took off her hat and placed it on the top shelf in the wardrobe.  Had he beaten her she felt that she could almost have loved him, but the primitive sex instinct in her was outraged by his gentleness.

“Has anybody hurt your feelings?” asked Abel, turning suddenly on his way to the door.

“No.”

“Then, for God’s sake, what is it?” he demanded, at his wit’s end.  “You look as if you’d lost the last friend you had on earth.”

At this she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before they escaped.  A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom, and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long, agonized tremors shook her slender figure.  Looking at her, he remembered bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy.  By the sacrifice of his own inclinations he had achieved this disastrous result.  If he had tried to do evil instead of good, he could hardly have wrought more irreparable mischief—­and with the thought, pity, which had led him astray, winged off, like an ironic sprite, and left his heart empty of comfort.

“God knows I am sorry for you, Judy,” he said in the effort to reinforce his compassion.

But Judy, though she was avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression of it from her husband—­for her temperament was of the morbid kind that is happiest when it is most miserable.  Her heart had fed upon the sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men—­if not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could cut even more deeply.  She turned in the direction of sentiment as instinctively as a plant turns toward light, and the Reverend Orlando Mullen had had predecessors in her affections who had been hardly so much as aware of her existence.

As Abel went out of the door, her accusing eyes followed him while she thought, with sentimental regret, of the many things she had given up when she married—­of Mrs. Mullen’s ironing day, of the rector’s darning, of the red flannel petticoats she had no longer time to make for the Hottentots.  It was over one of these flannel petticoats that Mr. Mullen had first turned to her with his earnest and sympathetic look, as though he were probing her soul.  At the moment she had felt that his casual words held a hidden meaning, and to this day, though she had pondered them in sleepless nights ever since, she was still undecided.

“I don’t believe he knew how much I cared,” she said, as she started mechanically to take out her hairpins.

CHAPTER IX

A MEETING IN THE PASTURE

As Judy did not appear next morning, her breakfast was carried up to her by Sarah, who allowed her own cakes to become leathery while she arranged the tray.  Her feet were still on the staircase, when Blossom turned to Abel and said in a furtive and anxious voice: