When he had turned into the branch road that led from the turnpike to the mill, a gig passed him, driven rapidly, and Reuben Merryweather called “good-night,” in his friendly voice.  An instant later a spot of white in the road caught Abel’s glance, and alighting, he picked up a knitted scarf, which he recognized even in the moonlight as one that Molly had worn.  Looking back he saw that the other gig had stopped at the turnpike, and as he hastened toward it with the scarf in his hand, he was rewarded by a flash of bright eyes from the muffled figure at Reuben’s side.

“I found this in the road,” he said, “you must have dropped it.”

“Yes, it fell out—­thank you,” she answered, and it seemed to him that her hand lingered an instant in his before it was withdrawn and buried beneath the rugs.

The pressure remained with him, and a little later as he drove over the frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft clinging touch of her fingers.  Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse.  People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation because he saw them under different conditions from those that hold sway over this planet.  The world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard; and this mixture of rustic ignorance and religious fervor had endowed him with a power of sacrifice in large matters, while it rendered him intolerant of smaller weaknesses.  It was characteristic of the man that he should have arranged for Molly in his thoughts, and at the cost of great suffering to himself, a happiness that was suited to the ideal figure rather than to the living woman.

When he entered the kitchen, after putting the mare into her stall, the familiar room, with its comfortable warmth, dragged him back into a reality in which the dominating spirit was Sarah Revercomb.  Even his aching heart seemed to recognize her authority, and to obtrude itself with a sense of embarrassment into surroundings where all mental maladies were outlawed.  She was on her knees busily sorting a pile of sweet potatoes, which she suspected of having been frost-bitten; and by sheer force of character, she managed to convince the despairing lover that a frost-bitten potato was a more substantial fact than a broken heart.

“I declar’ if the last one of ’em ain’t specked!  I knew ’twould be so when they was left out thar in the smoke-house that cold spell.  Abel, all those sweet potatoes you left out in the smoke-house have been nipped.”

“Well, I don’t care a hang!” retorted Abel, as he unwrapped his muffler.  “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.  You’re enough to drive a sober man to drink.”

“If you don’t care, I’d like to know who ought to,” responded Sarah, whose principal weapon in an argument was the fact that she was always the injured person.  “It seems that ‘twas all yo’ fault since you put ’em thar.”