“Take a night to sleep on yo’ temper Abel,” called Solomon after him, “and git a good breakfast inside of you befo’ you start out to do anything rash.  Well, I must be gittin’ along, folks, sad as it seems to me.  It’s strange to think, now ain’t it—­that when Nannie was married to Tom Middlesex an’ livin’ six miles over yonder at Piping Tree, I couldn’t have got over that road too fast on my way to her.”

“You’d still feel like that, friend, if she were still married to Tom Middlesex,” quavered old Adam. “’Tis the woman we oughtn’t to think on that draws us with a hair.”

“Now that’s a case in p’int,” replied Solomon, nodding after the vanishing figure of Abel.  “All his wits are in his eyes, as you can tell jest to look at him—­an’ for sech a little hop-o’-my-thumb female that don’t reach nigh up to his shoulder.”

“I can’t see any particular good looks in the gal, myself,” remarked Mrs. Bottom, “but then, when it’s b’iled down to the p’int, it ain’t her, but his own wishes he’s chasin’.”

“Did you mark the way she veered from him to Mr. Jonathan the other day?” inquired William Ming, “she’s the sort that would flirt with a scarecrow if thar warn’t anything else goin’.”

“The truth is that her eyes are bigger than her morals, an’ I said it the first time I ever seed her,” rejoined old Adam.  “My taste, even when I was young, never ran to women that was mo’ eyes than figger.”

Still discoursing, they stumbled out into the dusk, through which Abel’s large figure loomed ahead of them.

“A man that’s born to trouble, an’ that of the fightin’ kind—­as the sparks fly upward,” added the elder.

As the miller drove out of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft murmurs in the moist hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places.  In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey background of sky.

Half a mile farther on, where his road narrowed abruptly, a voice hallooed to him as he approached, and driving nearer he discerned dimly a man’s figure standing beside a horse that had gone lame.

“Halloo, there?  Have you a light?  My horse has got a stone or cast a shoe, I can’t make out which it is.”

Reaching for the lantern under his seat, Abel alighted and after calling “Whoa!” to his mare, walked a few steps forward to the stationary horse and rider in the dusk ahead.  As the light shone on the man and he recognized Jonathan Gay, he hesitated an instant, as though uncertain whether to advance or retreat.

“If I’d known ’twas you,” he observed gruffly, “I shouldn’t have been so quick about getting down out of my gig.”

“Thank you, all the same,” replied Gay in his pleasant voice.  “It doesn’t seem to be a stone, after all,” he added.  “I’m rather afraid he got a sprain when he stumbled into a hole a yard or two back.”