Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture.

“I thought you had gone,” he said, and held out his hand.

“Not yet.  Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October.”

In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight.

“Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day in June?” she asked suddenly.

“I didn’t know it, but it was nice of you.”

His renunciation had conferred a dignity upon him which had in it something of the quiet and the breadth of the Southern landscape.  She knew while she looked at him that he had accepted her decision once for all—­that he still accepted it in spite of the ensuing logic of events which had refuted its finality.  The choice had been offered her between love and the world, and she had chosen the world—­chosen in the heat of youth, in the thirst for experience.  She had not loved enough.  Her love had been slight, young, yielding too easily to the impact of other desires.  There had been no illusion to shelter it.  She had never, she remembered now, had any illusions—­all had been of the substance and the fibre of reality.  Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it differently.  At the time flight from love was as necessary to her growth as the return to love was necessary to her happiness to-day.  She saw clearly that her return was, after all, the result of her flight.  If she had not chosen the world, she would never have known how little the world signified in comparison with simpler things.  Life was all of a single piece; it was impossible to pull it apart and say “without this it would have been better”—­since nothing in it was unrelated to the rest, nothing in it existed by itself and independent of the events that preceded it and came after it.  Born as she had been out of sin, and the tragic expiation of sin, she had learned more quickly than other women, as though the spectre of the unhappy Janet stood always at her side to help her to a deeper understanding and a sincerer pity.  She knew now that if she loved Abel, it was because all other interests and emotions had faded like the perishable bloom on the meadow before the solid, the fundamental fact of her need of him.

“Do you still get books from the library in Applegate?” she asked because she could think of nothing to say that sounded less trivial.

“Sometimes, and second hand ones from a dealer I’ve found there.  One corner of the mill is given up to them.”

Again there was silence, and then she said impulsively in her old childlike way.

“Abel, have you ever forgiven me?”