ffer
to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked
suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never
compensated for the pang of it. Her failures now merely made his
manufactured excuses the easier. Once, when she had not been able to
come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting
of a long strain of anxiety. She still pressed for an acknowledgment
of their marriage, while his refusal was still based on a very real
solicitude for his mother. Only in the last six months had his feeling
for Molly entered into the situation; but like all swift and unguarded
emotions, it absorbed the colour in his thoughts, while it left both the
past and the future in the cover of darkness.

"I wish you wouldn't wander off alone like this, Molly," he began as he
joined her.

"Oh, it's perfectly safe, Jonathan--everybody knows me for miles
around."

"But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it. She has
never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself."

"Poor Aunt Kesiah," said Molly softly.

He glanced at her sharply. "Why do you say that?" he asked, "she has
always seemed to me to have everything she wanted. If she hadn't had
mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?"

"I wonder?" she returned; "but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt
Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?"

"Well, rather. What are you driving at?"

Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words,
appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated
Kesiah's generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look
tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This
quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he
watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he
told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen
whose infinite variety he could not exhaust. The mere recollection of
the others wearied him. Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel
a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an
allurement to his senses. The idea that this might be love, after all,
had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he
met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that "he hadn't it
in him." Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him
over the jewelled landscape, and the he