The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves.  Small shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on.  In Abel’s dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow beyond the mill-race.  He had consecrated a strip of giant pine to this purpose, and often, while he lingered in the door of his mill, he felt himself battling against the desire to take down his axe and strike his first blow toward the building of Molly’s home.  His mother might nag at him about Molly now, but let them be married, he told himself, with sanguine masculine assurance, and both women would reconcile themselves to a situation that neither could amend.  Before the immediate ache of his longing for the girl, all other considerations evaporated to thin air.  He would rather be unhappy with her, he thought passionately, than give her up!

“Abel, if you don’t stop mopin’ out thar an’ come along in, I’ll clear off the dishes!” called his mother again in her rasping voice which sounded as if she were choking in a perpetual spasm of moral indignation.

Jerking his shoulders slightly in an unspoken protest, Abel turned and entered the kitchen, where Sarah Revercomb—­tall, spare and commanding—­was preparing two bowls of mush for the aged people, who could eat only soft food and complained bitterly while eating that.  She was a woman of some sixty years, with a stern handsome face under harsh bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner where her upper teeth had been drawn.  Her figure was erect and flat as a lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of her drab calico dress.  In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard, obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for their bitter and hostile expression.

At the table there were Abner Revercomb, some ten or twelve years older than Abel, and Archie, the youngest child, whom Sarah adored and bullied.  Blossom was busy about something in the cupboard, and on either side of the stove the old people sat with their small, suspicious eyes fixed on the pan of mush which Sarah was dividing with a large wooden spoon into two equal portions.  Each feared that the other would receive the larger share, and each watched anxiously to see into which bowl the last spoonful would fall.  For a week they had not spoken.  Their old age was racked by a sharp and furious jealousy, which was quite exclusive and not less exacting than their earlier passion of love.