his
character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to
think lightly of renouncing--or of inviting another to renounce--an
income of ten thousand dollars a year. _He_ might dream that love would
bring happiness, but she was reasonably assured that money would bring
comfort. Between the dream and the assurance there would have been,
in Sarah's mind at least, small room left for choice. He had known few
women, and for one dreadful minute he asked himself, passionately, if
Molly and his mother could be alike?

Unconsciously to himself his voice when he spoke again had lost its ring
of conviction.

"Perhaps I may see her later?" he repeated.

"The funeral will be to-morrow. You will be there?"

"Yes, I'll be there," he replied; and then because there was nothing
further for him to say, he bowed over his hat, and went down the flagged
walk to the orchard, where the bluebirds were still singing. His misery
appeared to him colossal--of a size that overshadowed not only the
spring landscape, but life itself. He tried to remember a time when he
was happy, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination at the
moment, and it seemed to him that he had plodded on year after year with
a leaden weight oppressing his heart.

"I might have known it would be like this," he was thinking. "First, I
wanted the mill, so I'd lie awake at night about it, and then when I got
it all the machinery was worn out. It's always that way and always
will be, I reckon." And it appeared to him that this terrible law of
incompleteness lay like a blight over the over the whole field of human
endeavour. He saw Molly, fair and fitting as she had been yesterday
after the quarrel, and he told himself passionately that he wanted her
too much ever to win her. On the ground by the brook he saw the spray
of last year's golden-rod, and the sight brought her back to him with
a vividness that set his pulses drumming. In his heart he cursed Mr.
Jonathan's atonement more fervently than he had ever cursed his sin.

The next day he went to Reuben's funeral, with his mother and Blossom
at his side, walking slowly across the moist fields, in which the vivid
green of the spring showed like patches of velvet on a garment of dingy
cloth. In front of him his mother moved stiffly in her widow's weeds,
which she still wore on occasions of ceremony, and in spite of her
sincere sorrow for Reuben she cast a sharp eye more than once on the hem
of her alpac