have you known it?"

But she was on her guard now, wrapped in that soft, pale reticence which
was the spiritual aspect of her beauty.

"It may have been only one of the darkies' stories. I didn't pay much
attention to it," she answered, and busied herself about the geraniums
in the window.

"Oh, you can't put any faith in the darkies' tales," rejoined Abel, and
after leaving a message with his mother for a farmer with whom he had
an appointment, he hastened out of the house and over the fields in the
direction of Reuben Merryweather's cottage. Here, where he had expected
to find Molly, Kesiah met him, with some long black things over her arm,
and a frown of anxious sympathy on her face.

"The child is broken-hearted," she said with dignity, for a funeral
was one of the few occasions upon which she felt that she appeared to
advantage. "I don't think she can see you--but I'll go in and ask, if
you wish it."

She went in, returning a minute later, with the black things still over
her arm, and a deeper frown on her forehead.

"No--I'm sorry, but she doesn't wish to see any one. You know, the old
hound died the same night, and that has added to her sorrow."

"Perhaps if I come back later?"

"Perhaps; I am not sure. As soon as the funeral is over she will come to
us. You have heard, I suppose, of the change in--in her circumstances?"

"Then it is true? I heard it, but I didn't believe it."

Molly had fled suddenly into remoteness--not Reuben's death, but Mr.
Jonathan's "provision," had swept her away from him. Like other
mortals in other crises of experience, she was aware of a helpless,
a rebellious, realization of the power, not of fate, but of money. No
other accident of fortune could have detached her so completely from the
surroundings in which he had known her. Though he told himself that
to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid
brutality of soul, he revolted the next instant from the idea that his
love should demand so great a sacrifice. Like the majority of men who
have risen to comparative comfort out of bitter poverty, he had at the
same time a profound contempt and an inordinate respect for the tangible
fact of money--a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect
for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the
symbol. Sarah's hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery
of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in