“I asked her if she were ill and if we could do anything for her.”

“I can’t get over her look.  I wish I had jumped down and run after her, but she went off so quickly.”

So intense was the sunshine that it appeared to burn into the white streak of the road, where the dust floated like some smoke on the breathless air.  From the scorched hedges of sumach and bramble, a chorus of grasshoppers was cheerfully giving praise to a universe that ignored it.

As Molly rode silently at Gay’s side, it seemed to her that Blossom’s startled face looked back at her from the long, hot road, from the waste of broomsedge, from the cloudless sky, so bright that it hurt her eyes.  It was always there wherever she turned:  she could not escape it.  A sense of suffocation in the midst of space choked back the words she would have spoken, and she felt that the burning dust, which hung low over the road, had drifted into her brain and obscured her thoughts as it obscured the objects around her.  When, after passing the ordinary, they turned into the Applegate road, the heavy shade brought a sensation of relief, and the face which had seemed to start out of the blanched fields, faded slowly away from her.

As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear Abel’s speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her.  In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution.  She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end.  Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.

“I don’t believe I’ll stay, after all, Jonathan,” she said weakly.  “It’s so hot and I don’t really want to hear him.”

“But we’re here now, Molly, and he’s already begun.”  Against the feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the trouble.  “It’s over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house,” he pursued.  “Come on.  We needn’t dismount if you don’t feel like it—­but I’ve a curiosity to know what he’s talking about.”

Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing the miller.  Abel’s ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of political material.  The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the higher to the lower classes.  To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the miller’s raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest and tolerant amusement.