“Then I’ll never forgive you, Molly, so help me God,” he added harshly; and turning away from her, struck out across the pasture in the direction of the mill.

For a moment she stood looking after him, her lips parted, her eyes wide and bright as if she were asking a question.

“I am hard—­hard and cruel,” she thought as she went slowly up the witch-hazel path that led by the Poplar Spring, “but I wonder—­oh, I wonder if I treat Abel worst because I like him best?”

CHAPTER XI

A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER

When Abel had flung himself over the fence, he snatched the collar from his neck and threw it away from him into the high grass of the meadow.  The act was symbolical not only of his revolt from the power of love, but, in a larger measure, of his rebellion against the tyranny of convention.  Henceforth his Sunday clothes might hang in the closet, for he would never again bend his neck to the starched yoke of custom.  Everything had been for Molly forever.  Her smiles or her frowns, her softness or her cruelty, would make no difference to him in the future—­for had not Molly openly implied that she preferred Mr. Mullen?  So this was the end of it all—­the end of his ambition, of his struggle to raise himself, of his battle for a little learning that she might not be ashamed.  Lifting his head he could see dimly the one great pine that towered on the hill over its fellows, and he resolved, in the bitterness of his defeat, that he would sell the whole wood to-morrow in Applegate.  He tried to think clearly—­to tell himself that he had never believed in her—­that he had always known she would throw him over at the last—­but the agony in his heart rose in his throat, and he felt that he was stifling in the open air of the pasture.  His nature, large, impulsive, scornful of small complexities, was stripped bare of the veneer of culture by which its simplicity had been overlaid.  At the instant he was closer to the soil beneath his feet than the civilization of his race.

As he neared the brook, which divided his pasture from the fields belonging to Jordan’s Journey, the sound of angry voices came to his ears, and through the bared twigs of the willows, he saw Archie and Jonathan Gay standing a little apart, while the boy made threatening gestures with a small switch he carried.

“I’ve told him he was not to come on our land and he’s laughed in my face!” cried Archie, turning to his brother.

“I’m not laughing, I merely said that the restriction was absurd,” replied Jonathan in a friendly tone.  “Why this pasture of yours juts in between my field and the road, and I’m obliged to cross it.  I told you before I was awfully sorry about the quarrel when I first came, but as long as you leave my birds alone, you may walk over my land all day if you like and I shan’t care a copper.”

“Damn your birds!  I don’t take a blow from any man without paying him back,” retorted Archie.