oil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as
politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us--we're losing
grip--and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes
from."

"Ah, it's just that--pluck--but put the miller in the crucible
and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in
prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the
surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed
by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office--she was
one of the real Carters, you know--would hardly bend her head."

"Perhaps you're right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his
breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics
of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?"

CHAPTER VII

GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS

At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in
his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on
his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the
haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October
morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the
graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung
over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on
the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they
had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled
into a frosty stillness at daybreak.

"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay,
with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had
been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves
more of a nuisance."

Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion,
he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had
thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt,
somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with
his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a
hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter
of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but
a condemnation."

With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as
a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass
in front of him,