ad softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations
of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of
human happiness--as something which must be paid for, either literally
in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials of
salvation.

"I declar' things are goin' on so smooth that something must be gettin'
ready to happen," she said anxiously to herself at least twenty times a
day--for she had observed life, and in her opinion, the observation had
verified the rigid principles of her religion. Do what you would the
doctrines of original sin and predestination kept cropping up under the
surface of existence. And so--"It looks all right on top, but you never
can tell," was the habitual attitude of her mind.

When dinner was over, Abel went out to the mill, with Moses, the hound,
trotting at his heels. The high wind was still blowing, and while he
stood by the mill-race, the boughs of the sycamore rocked back and forth
over his head with a creaking noise. At each swing of the branches a
crowd of broad yellow leaves was torn from the stems and chased over the
moving wheel to the open meadow beyond.

With the key of the mill in his hand, Abel stopped to gaze over the
green knoll where he had once planned to build his house. Beyond it he
saw the strip of pines, and he knew that the tallest of the trees had
fallen uselessly beneath his axe. The great trunk still lay there, fast
rotting to dust on the carpet of pine cones. He had never sold it for
timber. He would never use it for the rafters of his home.

As he looked back now all that past life of his appeared to him fair and
desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood,
and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its
fullest--that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable
in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the
past, and he thought of himself as always eager and enthusiastic then,
as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year
when he had gone away, and worked in the factory in order to educate
himself, was revealed as a period of delightful promise, of wonderful
opportunity. In remembering his love for Molly, he forgot the quarrels,
the jealousies, the heartburnings, and recalled only the exquisite
instant of their first lover's kiss. Then, he told himself, that even
while he had enjoyed his life, it had