thing like that, no bigger than a child. It wasn't her fault, was it, if her father played false with her mother?"
"Oh, I'm not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble seems to be, doesn't it, merely that the men like her too much? She's got a way with her, there's no question about that."
"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"
"I wasn't blackenin' her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt, and you know that as well as I do—better, I shouldn't wonder."
"It's the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the meanness of men."
"Oh, well, it's all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that you don't go too near the fire and get scorched."
Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.
After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes, but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do they keep at me about her?" he asked passionately. "Is it true that she is only playing with me as she plays with the others?"—but the pain was too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings. On her head there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this resting on her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of boyish gallantry to her slender figure. Like most women of mobile features and ardent temperament, her beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the space of a minute. Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the crimson jacket.
"Abel!" she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the water sparkled beneath her. Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made sufficient amends; but in forming this resolution, he had reckoned without the probable intervention of Molly.
"I thought—as long as I was going by—that I'd stop and speak to you," she said.
He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence. "You didn't treat me fair yesterday, Molly," he answered.
"Oh, I wanted to tell you about that. I quite meant to go with you—only it went out of my head."
"That's a pretty excuse, isn't it, to offer a man?"
"Well, you aren't the only one I've offered it to," she dimpled enchantingly, "the rector had to be satisfied with it as well. He asked me, too, and when I forgot I'd promised you, I said I'd go with him to see old Abigail. Then I forgot that, too," she added with a penitent sigh, "and went down to the low grounds."
"You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the cross-roads," he commented with bitterness.
A less daring adventurer than Molly would have hesitated at his tone and grown cautious, but a certain blithe indifference to the consequences of her actions was a part of her lawless inheritance from the Gays.
"I think him very good-looking, don't you?" she inquired sweetly.
"Good-looking? I should think not—a fat fop like that."
"Is he fat? I didn't notice it—but, of course, I didn't mean that he was good-looking in your way, Abel."
The small flowerlike shadows trembled across her face, and beneath her feet the waves churned a creamy foam that danced under her like light. His eyes warmed to her, yet he held back, gripped by a passion of jealousy. For the first time he felt that he was brought face to face with a rival who might prove to have the advantage.
"I am coming over!" called Molly suddenly, and a minute later she stood in the square sunshine that entered the mill door.
Had he preserved then his manner of distant courtesy, it is probable that she would have melted, for it was not in her temperament to draw back while her prey showed an inclination for flight. But it was his nature to warm too readily and to cool too late, a habit of constitution which causes, usually, a tragedy in matters of sex.
"You oughtn't to treat me so, Molly!" he exclaimed reproachfully, and made a step toward her.
"I couldn't help forgetting, could I? It was your place to remind me."
Thrust, to his surprise, upon the defensive he reached for her hand, which was withdrawn after it had lain an instant in his.
"Well, it was my fault, then," he said with a generosity that did him small service. "The next time I'll remind you every minute."
She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her unkindness even, were but the sportive and innocent freaks of a child. In his rustic sincerity he was forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the appealing sweetness of her look. He told himself twenty times a day that she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that in her heart she was to blame for her flirting. A broad and charitable distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that she did. It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of which she was still unconscious.
"Molly," he burst out almost fiercely, "will you marry me?"
The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her forehead.
"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she answered, "but that if I ever did—"
"Then you'd marry me."
"Well, if I were obliged to marry somebody, I'd rather marry you than anybody else."
"So you do like me a little?"
"Yes, I suppose I like you a little—but all men are the same—mother used always to tell me so."
Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of his paradise. He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met and passed through some hour of despair and disillusionment.
"But how could she judge, Molly? How could she judge?" he pleaded "She was ill, she wasn't herself, you must know it. All men are not alike. Didn't I fight her battles more than once, when you were a child?"
"I know, I know," she answered gratefully, "and I love you for it. That's why I don't mind telling you what I've never told a single one of the others. I haven't any heart, Abel, that's the truth. It's all play to me, and I like the game sometimes and sometimes I hate
