“I suppose you think it would do me good to be preached to three times a day?” she rejoined.

“Well, I believe it wouldn’t hurt you, Molly,” he responded with a smile.

His attitude of renouncement drew her suddenly nearer.

“It wasn’t about Mr. Mullen that I came to talk to you—­there is something else.”

“Surely you aren’t thinking of Jim Halloween?”

“No, no, it isn’t a man.  Why do you seem to think that the beginning and middle and end of my existence is a man?  There are times when I find even a turkey more interesting.”

“It is about a turkey, then, that you have come to see me?”

“Oh, no, it’s a man, after all, but not a lover—­he’s Mr. Chamberlayne, the lawyer, from Applegate.  Yesterday when he was spending the day at the big house, he came over to see me.”

“Had he never seen you before?”

“Of course, when I was little—­and later he took me to school in Applegate.  I was to stay there until I was twenty-one you know, but I ran away the second year because grandfather fell ill with pneumonia and there was no one to look after him.  You remember that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I remember.  I picked you up on the road and brought you home in my gig.  There was a heavy snow storm.”

“It seems that I was meant to be educated as a lady.  Old Mr. Jonathan left a letter about it.”

“He did?—­damn him!  Why didn’t he save himself the trouble by acting decently in the beginning?”

“That was because of Mrs. Gay—­he had promised her, when he thought she was dying, some dreadful thing.  And after that he was afraid—­afraid of her all his life.  Isn’t it terrible that such a saintly person should have caused so much sin?”

“But what was she to him that he should have been such a coward about her?”

“Oh, he loved her more than anything on earth—­for he loved my mother only a little while.  When Mrs. Gay first came to live with him, she was so beautiful and so delicate, that she looked as if a wind would blow her away—­so soft that she could smother a person like a mass of feathers.  He felt after that that he had entangled himself, and it was only at the last when he was dying that he had any remorse.  With all his wickedness there was a terrible kind of religion in him—­like a rock that is buried under the earth—­and he wanted to save his soul alive before he passed on to judgment.  As if that did any good—­or he could make amends either to me or to God.”

“I rather hope he was as unsuccessful in the last case as in the first.  But, tell me, Molly, how does it affect you?”

“Not at all—­not at all—­if he has left me money, I shall not touch it.  He wasn’t thinking of mother, but of his own soul at the end, and can you tell me that God would wipe out all his dreadful past just because of one instant’s fear?”

Her passion, so unlike the meekness of Janet Merryweather, made him look at her wonderingly, and yet with a sympathy that kept him dumb.  It took the spirit of a Gay to match a Gay, he thought, not without bitterness.