Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words, appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated Kesiah’s generation from her own.  The edge of sweetness to her look tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced.  This quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen whose infinite variety he could not exhaust.  The mere recollection of the others wearied him.  Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an allurement to his senses.  The idea that this might be love, after all, had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that “he hadn’t it in him.”  Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him over the jewelled landscape, and the heavens had opened.  Once more the unattainable had appeared to him wrapped in the myriad-coloured veil of his young illusions.

“Molly,” he said almost in spite of himself, “what would have happened to us if we had met five or six years ago?”

“Nothing, probably.”

“Well, I’m not so sure—­not if you like me half as well as I like you.  You understand, don’t you, that I got myself tied up—­entangled before I knew you—­but, by Jove, if I were free I’d make you think twice about me.”

“There’s no use talking about what might have been, is there?”

The hint of his “entanglement,” she had accepted quite simply as a veiled allusion to an incident in his life abroad.  Her interest in it would have been keener had she been less indifferent to him as a lover, but while she walked by his side, smiling in response to his words, she was thinking breathlessly, like one hushed in suspense, “If Abel had only been like that a year ago, I should not have left him.”  That the qualities she had always missed in the miller had developed only through the loss of her, she refused to admit.  A swift, an almost miraculous change had passed over her, and all the warm blood in her body seemed to rush back to her heart, giving it the abundance of life.  The world appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy places of the Haunt’s Walk.  “Yes, if he had been like that I should never have left him and all this would not have happened,” she thought again; “and if I had been like this would he ever have quarrelled with me?” she asked herself the instant afterwards.

And Gay, walking at her side, but separated by a mental universe, was thinking resentfully, “The deuce of it is that it might just as well never have happened!  If I’d only been a little less of a fool—­If I’d only not walked my horse across the pasture that October afternoon—­If I’d only had sense enough to see what was coming—­If I’d only—­oh, hang it!”