“Judy and I are friends.  That’s another reason for my wanting to hear him.”

“But to ride six miles at three o’clock on a scorching day to listen to a stump speech by a rustic agitator, seems to me a bit ridiculous.”

“There was no reason for your coming, Jonathan.  I didn’t ask you.”

“I accept the reproof, and I am silent—­but I can’t resist returning it by telling you that you need a man’s strong hand as much as any woman I ever saw.”

“I don’t need yours anyway.”

“By Jove, that’s just whose, my pretty.  You needn’t think that because I haven’t made you love me, I couldn’t.”

“I doubt it very much—­but you may think so if you choose.”

“Suppose I were to dress in corduroy and run a grist mill.”

Her laugh came readily.

“You’re too fat!”

“Another thrust like that, and I’ll gallop off and leave you.”

His face was bent toward hers, and it was only the quick change in her expression, and the restive start of her horse, that made him swerve suddenly aside and glance at the blazed pine they were passing.  Leaning against the tree, with her arms resting on the bars, and her body as still as if it were chiselled out of stone, Blossom Revercomb was watching them over a row of tall tiger lilies.  Her features were drawn and pallid, as if from sharp physical pain, and a blight had spread over her beauty, like the decay of a flower that feeds a canker at its heart.

With an exclamation of alarm, Molly turned her horse’s head in the direction of the pine, but with a hasty yet courteous gesture, Gay rode quickly ahead of her, and leaning from his saddle spoke a few words in an undertone.  The next instant Blossom had fled and the two were riding on again down the turnpike.

“She looked so unhappy, Jonathan.  I wonder what was the matter?”

“She was tired, probably.”  He despised himself for the evasion, for his character was naturally an open one, and he heartily disliked all subterfuge.  Yet he implied the falsehood even while he hated the necessity which forced him to it.  So all his life he had done the things that he condemned, condemning himself because he did them.  For more than a year now he had lived above a continuous undercurrent of subterfuge—­he had lied to Blossom, he had deceived his mother, he had wilfully encouraged Molly to believe a falsehood—­and yet all the time, he was conscious that his nature preferred the honourable and the candid course.  His intentions were still honest, but long ago in his boyhood, when he had first committed himself to impulse, he had prepared the way for his subsequent failures.  To-day, with a weakened will, with an ever increasing sensitiveness of his nervous system, he knew that he should go on desiring the good while he compromised with the pleasanter aspect of evil.

“She wouldn’t speak to me,” said Molly, “I can’t understand it.  What did you say to her?”