l 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her hand lingered an instant in his before it was withdrawn and buried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."

"You'd better give him some supper--he looks