In front of Molly, the path, deep in silvery orchard grass, wound through the pasture to the witch-hazel thicket at Jordan’s Journey; and when she entered the shelter of the trees, Gay came, whistling, toward her from the direction of the Poplar Spring.  He walked rapidly, and his face wore an anxious and harassed expression, for he was making the unpleasant discovery that even stolen sweets may become cloying to a surfeited palate.  His passion had run its inevitable course of desire, fulfilment, and exhaustion.  So closely had it followed the changing seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed in the Haunt’s Walk.  The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn.  He was conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love for Blossom was over.  There was no regret in his mind for the poignant sweetness of the days before he had married her—­for the restlessness, the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense—­nor even for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment.  He did not suffer to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never compensated for the pang of it.  Her failures now merely made his manufactured excuses the easier.  Once, when she had not been able to come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting of a long strain of anxiety.  She still pressed for an acknowledgment of their marriage, while his refusal was still based on a very real solicitude for his mother.  Only in the last six months had his feeling for Molly entered into the situation; but like all swift and unguarded emotions, it absorbed the colour in his thoughts, while it left both the past and the future in the cover of darkness.

“I wish you wouldn’t wander off alone like this, Molly,” he began as he joined her.

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe, Jonathan—­everybody knows me for miles around.”

“But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it.  She has never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself.”

“Poor Aunt Kesiah,” said Molly softly.

He glanced at her sharply.  “Why do you say that?” he asked, “she has always seemed to me to have everything she wanted.  If she hadn’t had mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?”

“I wonder?” she returned; “but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?”

“Well, rather.  What are you driving at?”