“He’s a first-rate parson, but a darn fool of a horseman,” observed Abel, with the disgust of a good driver for a poor one.  “You’d better go in and lie down, Judy, you look like a ghost.”

“I don’t want to lie down—­I wish I were dead,” replied Judy, choking back her hysterical sobs.  Then turning suddenly into the mill, she sank against the old mill-stone on the wooden platform and burst into a fit of wild and agonized weeping.  Her hand, when he touched it, was as cold as clay and as unresponsive to his.

“Judy,” he said and his voice was wonderfully gentle, “does it really mean so much to you?  Are you honestly grieving like this about Mr. Mullen?”

If he had only known it his gentleness to her was the thing for which at times she almost hated him.  The woman in her was very primitive—­a creature that harked back to the raw sensations of the jungle—­and nothing less than sheer brutality on Abel’s part could free her from the charm of the young clergyman’s unconscious cruelty.

She looked up at him with accusing eyes, which said, “I don’t care who knows that I love him,” as plainly as did her huddled and trembling figure, clinging pathetically to the old mill-stone, as though it were some crudely symbolic Rock of Ages which she embraced.

“Is it because he is going away or would you have felt this just as much if he had stayed?” he asked, after a minute in which he had watched her with humorous compassion.

Raising herself at the question, she pushed the damp hair from her forehead, and sat facing him on the edge of the platform.

“I could have borne it—­if—­if I might have had his sermons every Sunday to help me,” she answered, and there was no consciousness of shame, hardly any recognition of her abasement, in her tone.  Like all helpless victims of great emotions, she had ceased to be merely an individual and had become the vehicle of some impersonal destructive force in nature.  It was not Judy, but the passion within her that was speaking through her lips.

“But what good would they have done you?  You would have been miserable still.”

“At—­at least I should have seen him, an’—­an’ been strengthened in my religion—–­”

The grotesque, the pitiless horror of it struck him for an instant.  That she was half distraught and wholly morbid, he saw from her look, and the sight awakened that indomitable pity which had served always as a medium for the biting irony of life.

“To save my soul I can’t see what satisfaction you would have got out of that,” he remarked.

“I did—­I did.  They helped me to be spiritual minded,” wailed Judy with the incoherence of complete despair.  If her infatuation was ridiculous, it occurred to Abel that her courage, at least, was sublime.  From a distance and with brighter hair, she might even have been mistaken for a tragic example of immortal passion.  The lover in his blood pitied her, but the Calvinist refused to take her seriously.