The glow faded from his eyes and a look like that of an animal under the lash took its place.

“Come with me, not with him, Molly, you owe me that much,” he entreated.

“But he’s such a good man, and he preaches such beautiful sermons.”

“He does—­I know he does, but I love you a thousand times better.”

“Oh, he loves me because I am pretty and hard to win—­just as you do,” she retorted.  “If I lost my hair or my teeth how many of you, do you think, would care for me to-morrow?”

“I should—­before God I’d love you just as I do now,” he answered with passion.

A half mocking, half tender sound broke from her lips.

“Then why don’t you—­every one of you, fall head over ears in love with Judy Hatch?” she inquired.

“I don’t because I loved you first, and I can’t change, however badly you treat me.  I’m sometimes tempted to think, Molly, that mother is right, and you are possessed of a devil.”

“Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring home to her.”

The softness had gone out of her voice at the mention of Sarah’s name, and she had grown defiant and reckless.

“I don’t think you are just to my mother, Molly,” he said after a moment, “she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is most often for your good.”

“I suppose it was for my mother’s good that she kept her from going to church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?”

“That’s an old story—­you were only a month old.  Can’t you forget it?”

“I’ll never forget it—­not even at the Day of Judgment.  I don’t care how I’m punished.”

Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger.  While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers.  Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay.  The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion.  The inheritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence.  While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture.

“It isn’t you, Molly, that speaks like that,” he said, “it’s something in you.”  She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.

“If I’d known you were going to preach, I shouldn’t have stopped to speak to you,” she rejoined coldly.  “I’d rather hear Mr. Mullen.”

He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little.  Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill.