“I don’t know what we’re coming to,” said Gay at last, when they had ridden a mile or two without speaking.  What he really meant, though he did not say it, was, “I don’t know why in the devil’s name you keep thinking about that fellow?”

Though his own emotions were superior to reason, he was vaguely irritated because Molly had allowed hers, even in a small matter, to assert such a supremacy.  He was accustomed to speak carelessly of woman as “an emotional being,” yet this did not prevent his feeling an indignant surprise when woman, as occasionally happened, illustrated the truth of his inherited generalization.  A lover of the unconventional for himself, he was almost as strong a hater of it for the women who were related to him.  It would have annoyed him excessively to see Kesiah make herself conspicuous in any way, or deviate by a hair’s breadth from the accepted standard of her sex.  And now Molly, with whom he had fallen in love, had actually flushed and paled under his eyes at the sight of young Revercomb!  In some subtle manner she seemed to have stooped in his estimation—­to have lowered herself from the high and narrow pedestal upon which he had placed her!  Yet so contradictory are the passions, that he felt he loved her the more, if possible, because of the angry soreness at his heart.

Turning in the direction of Applegate, they continued their ride at a canter, and the afternoon was over when they passed the cross-roads again on their homeward way.  A thin mist floated like thistledown from the marshes, which were so distant that they were visible only as a pinkish edge to the horizon.  Large noisy insects, with iridescent wings, hovered around the purple, heavy scented tubes of the Jamestown weeds by the roadside, and the turnpike, glimmering like a white band through the purple dusk, was spangled with fireflies.  Gay was talking as they approached the blazed pine, which stood out sinister and black against the afterglow, and it was only when Molly cried out sharply that he saw Blossom’s face looking at them again over the tiger lilies.

“Why, what in the deuce!” he exclaimed, not in anger, but in amazement.

“Blossom, wait for me!” called Molly, and would have slipped to the ground had not Gay reached out and held her in the saddle.

Then the figure of Blossom, which had waited there evidently since their first passing, vanished like an apparition into the grey twilight.  The pallid face floated from them through the grape-scented mist, and Molly’s call brought no answer except the cry of a whip-poor-will from the thicket.

CHAPTER XII

ONE OF LOVE’S VICTIMS

A week later Jim Halloween stopped with a bit of news at Bottom’s Ordinary, where old Adam Doolittle dozed under the mulberry tree in a rush chair which had been brought over in his son’s oxcart.

“Have you all heard that our Mr. Mullen has accepted a call to larger fields?” he inquired, “an’ that Judy Revercomb has gone clean daft because he’s going to leave us?”