“Mrs. Bottom told me yesterday the Gays were coming back to Jordan’s Journey.  Have you heard anything about it?”

“No, I haven’t heard,” he answered indifferently, though his pulses throbbed at the words.  Rising from the table an instant later, he went out into the yard, where the sunshine filtered softly through June foliage.  By the porch a damask rose-bush was in bloom, and the fragrance followed him along the path between the borders of portulaca.  At the gate he found a young robin too weak to fly, and lifting it carefully, he returned it to the nest in a pear-tree.  Like all young and helpless things, it aroused in him a tenderness which, in some strange way, was akin to pain.

On the crooked sycamore the young leaves fluttered with shirred edges, and beyond the mill and the fallow field, the slender green ribbons of the corn were unfolding.  As he gazed at the pines on the horizon, he remembered the day he had swung his axe in joy under their branches, and it seemed to him, while he looked back upon it, that the hour belonged to the distant memories of his boyhood.

“It’s over now, and I’m not going to whine about it,” he said aloud to his hound.  “A plain fool is bad enough, Moses, my boy, but a whining fool is the meanest thing God ever made in man or dog.  Because I’ve lost the thing I wanted most, I’ve no mind to wallow in the dust—­but, oh, Molly, Molly!”

She came to him again, not fair and flitting, but ardent and tender, with her parted red mouth raised to his, and the light and darkness trembling on her face like faint shadows in the wind.  And this vision of her, which was so vivid that it shook his heart with a pang of agony, seemed saying to him in words which were not his—­which were not words at all, but some subtler communion of sense—­“I am to be loved, but never possessed, for, like the essence of desire, I elude forever the conditions of mortality.”

A week later, while the thought of her burned like fire in his brain, he met her face to face in the path which led from the blazed pine over the pasture to Jordan’s Journey.  Had he seen her in time, he would have fled from the meeting, but she appeared without warning as he turned from the turnpike to the bars.  Almost before he was aware of it, he was within touch of her and looking into her eyes.  She wore her black dress still, and the air of elegance, of strangeness, was even more obvious than when he had met her at Applegate the day before his marriage.  Her face had lost a little of its bloom, and there was a look in it which he had never seen there before—­a look which was wistful and yet expectant, as though, like old Reuben, she was hoping against knowledge and in despite of disappointment.

“Molly!” he cried, and stopped short, longing to touch her hand and yet with something, which was like conscience in the shape of Judy, restraining him.

“Abel, how little you’ve changed!” she said.