l proud, Quakers is. I never
could see no 'poorness of spirit,' come to git at 'em! And they're
wonderful clannish, too. My Luke, he'd a notion he'd like to run the
hull concern--Dorothy 'n' all; but I told him he might 's well p'int
off. Them Quaker gals don't never marry out o' meetin'. Besides, the
farm's too poor!"

"Good-night, Mr. Jordan!" said Evesham suddenly. "I'm off across lots!"
He leaped the fence, crashed through the alder hedge-row, and
disappeared in the dusky meadow.

Evesham was by no means satisfied with his experiments in planetary
distances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his orbit or hers, there
must be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the
attraction of atoms in the mass. Thus far, she had reversed the laws of
the spheres, and the greater had followed the less. When she had first
begun to hold a permanent place in his thoughts, he had invested her
with something of that atmosphere of peace and cool passivity which
hedges in the women of her faith. It had been like a thin, clear glass,
revealing her loveliness, but cutting off the magnetic currents. A
young man is not long satisfied with the mystery his thoughts have
woven around the woman who is their object. Evesham had grown
impatient; he had broken the spell of her sweet remoteness. He had
touched her, and found her human,--deliciously, distractingly human,
but with a streak of obduracy which history has attributed to the
Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted the mill-dam, and bribed
the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at the well-curb to ask
Dorothy for water, which did not reach his thirst. She was there in the
flesh, with her arms aloft, balancing the well-sweep, while he stooped
with his lips at the bucket; but in spirit she was unapproachable. He
felt, with disgust at his own persistence, that she even grudged him
the water! He grew savage and restless, and fretted over the subtle
changes which he counted in Dorothy, as the summer waned. She was
thinner and paler,--perhaps with the heats of harvest, which had not,
indeed, been burdensome from its abundance. Her eyes were darker and
shyer, and her voice more languid. Was she wearing down, with all this
work and care? A fierce disgust possessed him, that this sweet life
should be cast into the breach between faith and works.

He did not see that Rachel Barton had changed, too,--with a change that
meant more, at her age, than Dorothy's flushings and p