“I’d be a better man to-day if I’d known you sooner, Molly,” he said presently.  “A man couldn’t tire of you because you’re never the same thing two days in succession.”

“Doesn’t a man tire of change?”

“I don’t—­it’s the most blessed thing in life.  I wonder why you’ve given up flirting?”

“Perhaps because there isn’t anybody to flirt with.”

“I like that.  Am I not continually at your service?”

“But I don’t like your kind of flirting, somehow.”

“What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens.  Have you seen him, by the way?”

“He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the Bible.  I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch.”

“And the miller?”

She was walking beside a clump of lilies, and the colour of the flowers flamed in her face.

“I saw him for a few minutes this morning.”

“How has his marriage turned out?”

“I haven’t heard.  Like all the others, I suppose.”

“Well he’s as fine a looking animal as one often encounters.  His wife is that thin, drawn out, anaemic girl I saw at Piping Tree, isn’t she?  Such men always seem to marry such women.”

“I never thought Judy unattractive.  She’s really interesting if you take the trouble to dig deep enough.”

“I suppose Revercomb dug, but it isn’t as a rule a man’s habit to go around with a spade when he’s in want of a wife.”

With an impetuous movement, he bent closer to her: 

“Look here, Molly, don’t you think you might kiss me?”

“I told you the first time I ever saw you that I didn’t care for kissing.”

“Well, even if you don’t care, can’t you occasionally be generous?  You’ve got a colour in your cheeks like red flowers.”

“Oh, have I?”

“The trouble is, I’ve gone and fallen in love with you and it’s turning my head.”

“I don’t think it will hurt you, Jonathan.”

She broke away from him before he could detain her, and while a protest was still on his lips, ran up the walk and under the grape arbour into the back door of the house.

Left to himself, Gay wheeled about and passed into the side-garden, where he found Kesiah snipping off withered roses with a pair of pruning shears.

At his approach, she paused in her task and stood waiting for him, with the expression of interested, if automatic, attention, which appeared on her face, as in answer to some secret spring, whenever she was invited to perform the delicate part of a listener.  She had attained at last that battered yet smiling acquiescence in the will of Providence which has been eloquently praised, under different names, by both theologians and philosophers.  From a long and uncomplaining submission to boredom, she had arrived at a point of blessedness where she was unable to be bored at all.  Out of the furnace of a too ardent youth, her soul had escaped into the agreeable, if foggy, atmosphere of middle age.  Peace had been provided for her—­if not by generously presenting her with the things that she desired, still quite as effectually by crippling the energy of her desires, until they were content to sun themselves quietly in a row, like aged, enfeebled paupers along the south wall of the poorhouse.