“Abel, I wish you’d mend that leak in the smokehouse after breakfast,” remarked Sarah, in an aggressive tone that meant battle.  “Two shingles are gone an’ thare four more that want patchin’.”

“I can’t, I’ve got work to do at the mill,” replied Abel, as he rose from his chair.  “Solomon Hatch sent me his corn to grind and he’s coming over to get the sacks.”

“Well, I reckon I’m worth as much as Solomon Hatch, a little pasty faced critter like that,” rejoined Sarah.

“Why can’t Archie do it?  What is he good for?”

“I’m going hunting with Jim Halloween,” returned Archie sullenly, “he’s got some young dogs he wants to break in to rabbit running.”

“I might have known thar warn’t nobody to do what I ask ’em,” observed Sarah in the voice and manner of a martyr.  “It’s rabbits or girls, one or the other, and if it ain’t an old hare it’s some light-moraled critter like Molly Merryweather.”

Abel’s face had changed to a dull red and his eyes blazed.

“Say anything against Molly, mother, an’ I’ll never speak to you again!” he cried out angrily.

“Thar, thar, ma, you an’ Abel are too pepper tongued to get into a quarrel,” remarked Abner, the silent, who seldom spoke except for the promotion of peace.  “I’ll mend the roof for you whenever you want it.”

“I reckon I’ve got as much right to use my tongue as anybody else has,” retorted Sarah, indignant because a solution had been found and her grievance was annulled.  “If a girl ain’t a fast one that gets as good as engaged to half the young men in the county, then I’d like to know who is, that’s all?”

Then, as Abel called sharply to his fox-hound puppy and flung himself from the room, she turned away and went to sprinkle her calla lilies.  There was an agony in her breast, though she would have bitten out her tongue sooner than have confessed it.  Her strength lay in the fact that never in her life had she admitted even to herself, that she had been in the wrong.

CHAPTER V

THE MILL

Outside, a high wind was driving the fallen leaves in swirls and eddies, and as Abel crossed the road to the mill, he smelt the sharp autumn scent of the rotting mould under the trees.  Frost still sparkled on the bright green grasses that had overgrown the sides of the mill-race, and the poplar log over the stream was as wet as though the dancing shallows had skimmed it.  Over the motionless wheel the sycamore shed its broad yellow leaves into the brook, where they fluttered downward with a noise that was like the wind in the tree-tops.