“Well, if I were you, I’d go in and lie down,” he said feeling that it was, after all, the best advice he could offer her.  “You’re sick, that’s what’s the matter with you, and a cup of tea will do you more good than hugging that old mill-stone.  I know you can’t help it, Judy,” he added in response to a gesture of protestation, “you were born that way, and none of us, I reckon, can help the way we’re born.”  And since it is easier for a man to change his creed than his inheritance, he spoke in the tone of stern fatalism in which Sarah, glancing about her at life, was accustomed to say to herself, “It’s like that, an’ thar wouldn’t be any justice in it except for original sin.”

Judy struggled blindly to her feet, and still he did not touch her.  In spite of his quiet words there was a taste of bitterness on his lips, as though his magnanimity had turned to wormwood while he was speaking.  After all, he told himself in a swift revulsion of feeling, Judy was his wife and she had made him ridiculous.

“I know it’s hard on you,” she said, pausing on the threshold in the vain hope, he could see, that some word would be uttered which would explain things or at least make them bearable.  None was spoken, and her foot was on the single step that led to the path, when there came the sound of a horse running wildly up the road through the cornlands, and the next instant the young roan passed them, dragging Mr. Mullen’s shattered rig in the direction of the turnpike.

“Let me get there, Judy,” said Abel, pushing her out of his way, “something has happened!”

But his words came too late.  At sight of the empty gig, she uttered a single despairing shriek, and started at a run down the bank, and over the mill-stream.  Midway of the log, she stumbled shrieked again, and fell heavily to the stream below, from which Abel caught her up as if she were a child, and carried her to the opposite side, and across the rocky road to the house.  As she lay on Sarah’s bed, with Blossom working over her, she began to scream anew, half unconsciously, in the voice of frenzied terror with which she had cried out at the sound of the running horse.  Her face was grey, but around her mouth there was a blue circle that made it look like the sunken mouth of an old woman, and her eyes—­in which that stark terror was still visible, as though it had been rendered indelible by the violence of the shock that had called it into being—­seemed looking through the figures around her, with the intense yet unseeing gaze with which one might look through shadows in search of an object one does not find.

“Get the doctor at once, Abel,” said Blossom, “Grandma says something has happened to bring on Judy’s time.  Had you two been quarrelling?”

“Good God, no.  Mr. Mullen’s horse ran away with him and Judy saw it before I could catch her.  I don’t know yet whether he is dead or alive.”

“I saw him running bareheaded through the cornfield just as you brought Judy in, and I wondered what was the matter.  He was going after his horse, I suppose.”