He looked at Blossom as a man looks at the only thing he loves in life when he sees that thing suffering beneath his eyes and cannot divine the cause.  The veins grew large and stood out on his forehead, and the big knotted hand that was carrying his cup to his lips, trembled in the air and then sank slowly back to the table.  His usually dull and indifferent gaze became suddenly piercing as if it were charged with electricity.

“It’s nothing, father,” said Blossom, pressing her hand to her bosom, as though she were choking for breath, “and it’s all silly talk, I know, about Molly.”

“What does it matter to you if it’s true?” demanded Sarah tartly, but Blossom, driven from the room by a spasm of coughing, had already disappeared.

It was a close September night, and as Abel crossed the road to look for a young heifer in the meadow the heavy scent of the Jamestown weeds seemed to float downward beneath the oppressive weight of the atmosphere.  The sawing of the katydids came to him out of the surrounding darkness, through which a light, gliding like a gigantic glow-worm along the earth, revealed presently the figure of Jonathan Gay, mounted on horseback and swinging a lantern from his saddle.

“A dark night, Revercomb.”

“Yes, there’ll be rain before morning.”

“Well, it won’t do any harm.  The country needs it.  I’m glad to hear, by the way, that you are going into politics.  You’re a capital speaker.  I heard you last summer at Piping Tree.”

He rode on, and Abel forgot the meeting until, on his way back from the meadow, he ran against Blossom, who was coming rather wildly from the direction in which Jonathan had vanished.

“What has upset you so, Blossom?  You are like a ghost.  Did you meet Mr. Jonathan?”

“No, why should I meet Mr. Jonathan?  What do you mean?”

Without replying she turned from him and ran into the house, while following her more soberly, he asked himself carelessly what could have happened to disturb her.  “I wonder if she is frettin’ about the rector?” he thought, and his utter inability to understand, or even to recognize the contradictions in the nature of women oppressed his mind.  “First, she wanted Mr. Mullen and he didn’t want her, then he wanted her and she didn’t want him, and now when he’s evidently left off caring again, she appears to be grievin’ herself sick about him.  I wonder if it’s always like that—­everybody wanting the person that wants somebody else?  And yet I know I loved Molly a hundred times more, if that were possible, when I believed she cared for me.”  He remembered the December afternoon so many years ago, when she had run away from the school in Applegate, and he had found her breasting a heavy snow storm on the road to Jordan’s Journey.  Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday.