After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the meal pour from the valve.  A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes, but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp.  “Why do they keep at me about her?” he asked passionately.  “Is it true that she is only playing with me as she plays with the others?”—­but the pain was too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows.  The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond.  The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings.  On her head there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this resting on her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of boyish gallantry to her slender figure.  Like most women of mobile features and ardent temperament, her beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the space of a minute.  Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the crimson jacket.

“Abel!” she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the water sparkled beneath her.  Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made sufficient amends; but in forming this resolution, he had reckoned without the probable intervention of Molly.

“I thought—­as long as I was going by—­that I’d stop and speak to you,” she said.

He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence.  “You didn’t treat me fair yesterday, Molly,” he answered.

“Oh, I wanted to tell you about that.  I quite meant to go with you—­only it went out of my head.”

“That’s a pretty excuse, isn’t it, to offer a man?”

“Well, you aren’t the only one I’ve offered it to,” she dimpled enchantingly, “the rector had to be satisfied with it as well.  He asked me, too, and when I forgot I’d promised you, I said I’d go with him to see old Abigail.  Then I forgot that, too,” she added with a penitent sigh, “and went down to the low grounds.”

“You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the cross-roads,” he commented with bitterness.

A less daring adventurer than Molly would have hesitated at his tone and grown cautious, but a certain blithe indifference to the consequences of her actions was a part of her lawless inheritance from the Gays.

“I think him very good-looking, don’t you?” she inquired sweetly.