For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight.  “For God’s sake speak, Abel,” she said at last, “what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won’t strike back?”

“I’ll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever.”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I’d known you’d take it so quietly.”

“Quietly?  Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?”

“I shouldn’t have cared—­it would have been better than your expression at this minute.  It’s all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to.”

“Don’t worry.  Perhaps I shall in the end.  Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last.  It seems that you can’t help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you.”

“I wonder if that’s true?” she said a little sadly, turning away from him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow, “I’ve seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, and I’ve hated them for it.”

“What I can’t understand,” he pursued, not without bitterness, “is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn’t married should put up with it for an instant?”

At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough.

“The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather,” she said, “but I hate love-making.  When I see that look in a man’s face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill.  My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose.”

“I know it isn’t you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet—–­”

She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness.  As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust.  A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.

“I shouldn’t mind your kissing me just once, if you’d like to, Abel,” she said.

A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity?  She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her.  “Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly,” she thought, “and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me.  I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don’t, and I shan’t, if I live to be a hundred.  I’ve got no belief in it—­I’ve got no belief in anything, that is the trouble.  I’m twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the mill-race.”

A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike.  As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the old family carriage from Jordan’s Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat.  The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner’s physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver?