o an honest love," said Abel,
breathing hard between his word as if each one were torn from him with a
physical wrench at his heart. In losing his self-possession he had
lost his judgment as well, and, grasping something of his love from the
sincerity of his emotion, Gay made another ineffectual effort to present
the situation in a fairer light.

"If you would only listen, my good fellow--if you would only let me
explain things---" he began.

"Will you be quiet?" said Molly a second time, and then facing him
passionately she threw him a gesture of dismissal. "If you want to
please me, you will go."

"And leave you alone with him?"

She laughed. "Do you think I'm afraid of an angry man, or that I've
never seen one before?"

With that he obeyed her, turning from time to time on his way over the
meadow to make sure that she did not need his support. In spite of the
utter unreasonableness of the affair, in some unaccountable way his
sympathies were on the side of the miller. The fellow was a boor, of
course, but, by Jove! he was a magnificent boor. It had been long since
Gay had seen such an outburst of primitive feeling--long since he had
come so close to the good red earth on which we walk and of which we are
made.

"You're out of your head, Abel," said Molly--Gay turned away from
them--and the tone in which she spoke was hardly calculated to bring him
back to the place he had deserted. "You will say things you'll regret,
but I'll never forgive."

"I'm sick of your eternal forgiveness," he retorted. "I've been forgiven
every time you got into a temper, and I suppose I'll be forgiven next
every time you are kissed." The "rousing" which had threatened every
Revercomb was upon him at last.

"Well, as a matter of fact it is time enough for you to forgive me when
I ask you to," she returned.

"You needn't ask. It's too much this time, and I'll be damned before I
will do it."

Bending over a grey skeleton of last year's golden-rod, she caressed it
gently, without breaking its ghostly bloom. Years afterward, when she
had forgotten every word he uttered, she could still see that dried
spray of golden-rod growing against the April sky--she could still hear
a bluebird that sang three short notes and stopped in the willows. In
the quiet air their anger seemed to rush together as she had sometimes
thought their love had rushed to a meeting.

"You have neither the right to forgive me nor to judge me," she said.
"Do you