“Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but, I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to Janet Merryweather and to his brother’s widow?”

“There was a difference, of course.  Janet Merryweather could hardly have had Angela’s sensitive feelings—­or at least it’s a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true.  Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming—­but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its possession.”

She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly.

“Yes, I dare say,” returned Jonathan—­“The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of—­a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes.  Less than half a century produced him, but he’s here to stay, of that I am positive.  After all, why shouldn’t he, when we get down to the question?  He—­or the stock he represents, of course—­is already getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose.  We can’t hold on, the rest of us—­we’re losing grip—­and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes from.”

“Ah, it’s just that—­pluck—­but put the miller in the crucible and you’ll find how little pure gold there is to him.  It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office—­she was one of the real Carters, you know—­would hardly bend her head.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” he answered, and laughed shortly under his breath, “but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?”

CHAPTER VII

GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS

At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle’s room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn.  It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape.  The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak.

“By Jove, it’s these confounded acorns that keep me awake,” thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed.  “A dozen ghosts couldn’t have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance.”