ow?"

The meal poured softly out of the valve into the trough beneath, and
lifting a wooden scoop he bent over and scattered the pile in the
centre. A white dust had settled on his hair and clothes, and this
accentuated the glow in his face and gave to his whole appearance a
picturesque and slightly theatrical cast.

"If it hadn't been Molly, it would have been some one else," he added
impulsively. "Ma would be sure to hate any woman she thought I'd fallen
in love with. It's born in her to be contrary just as it is in that
hopvine out yonder that you can't train up straight."

"All the same, if I were going through fire and water for a girl, I'd be
pretty sure to choose one that would make it worth my while at the end.
I wouldn't put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that
was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me."

Abel's face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.

"If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you'd as well stop in
the beginning," he said. "It isn't right--I'll be hanged if it is!--that
every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no
bigger than a child. It wasn't her fault, was it, if her father played
false with her mother?"

"Oh, I'm not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like
her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble
seems to be, doesn't it, merely that the men like her too much? She's
got a way with her, there's no question about that."

"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"

"I wasn't blackenin' her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt,
and you know that as well as I do--better, I shouldn't wonder."

"It's the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years
before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the
meanness of men."

"Oh, well, it's all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that
you don't go too near the fire and get scorched."

Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a
dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.

After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the
meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes,
but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once
or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do
they keep at me about her?" he asked passionately. "I