“I’ll be hanged if I do!” exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves.  He was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed.  His hair was thick, dark and powdered usually with mill-dust.  His eyes, of a clear bright hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.  A certain tenacity—­a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class.  An opinion once embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded to was transformed into a principle.  Impulsive, generous, undisciplined, he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather.  Tradition had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his liberated intelligence—­of a passionate desire to test to the fullest the certainty of that liberation.  As the elder had suffered beneath the weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of class.  When political responsibility was thrust on the plainer people instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth.  The land which had belonged to the few became after the war within reach of the many.  At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of slavery.  The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the shadow of the old names—­the old customs.  This mole-like blindness of the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the awakening was possible only after the newer authority was but a shadow; the past reverence but a delusion.  When the black labourer worked, not freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by magic.  To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel’s ancestors had got out of the habit of trying.  The beneficent charity of the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have remained—­and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another.  In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and unrewarded was the act of toil.  So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel’s father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the hearth to which his mother had called him.