dy could have squandered itself with such superb
prodigality.

"I don't know," she answered wearily, "I've never noticed much either
what people get or what they want."

"Well, Blossom wanted Mr. Mullen once and now he wants Blossom. I wish
mother didn't have so poor an opinion of him."

She flushed and looked up quickly, for in her heart she felt that she
hated Sarah Revercomb. A disgust for her coming marriage swept over her.
Then she told herself stubbornly that everybody married sooner or later,
and that anyway her stepmother would never forgive her if she broke off
with Abel.

"She doesn't even go to his church. I don't see what right she has to
find fault with him," she said.

"That's her way, you know. You can't make her over. She pretends he
doesn't know his Scripture and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks
him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarrass him. Yesterday
she told him she couldn't call to mind the difference in cubits between
the length and the breadth of Solomon's temple, and would he please save
her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out?"

"Does she want him to stop coming?" inquired Judy, breathlessly.

"I don't know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don't
you?"

"Don't I?" she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor,
where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern. As
they were gathering them up, their heads touched by accident, and he
kissed her gravely. For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his
brilliant eyes, "Abel is really very handsome, after all." Then folding
her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed
the basket on a shelf between a bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of
pressed flowers under a glass case. "He couldn't have got anybody to
fill in those holes better," she said to herself, and the reflection was
not without a balm for her aching heart.

At dawn next morning Abel passed again, driving in the direction of
the Applegate road. The day was breaking clear and still, and over the
autumnal pageantry in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs
shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily
harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter
of sassafras. Overhead the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as
heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond a sharp twist
in the corduroy road, a branch of sweet