"Maria gave me this," he explained, "and I'm going to town to turn it into money."
"Well, I'll keep an eye on the place while you are away," returned Christopher, without looking at the trinket. "Go about your business, and for heaven's sake don't stop to drink. Some men can stand liquor; you can't. It makes a beast of you."
"And not of you, eh?"
"It never gets the chance. I know when to stop. That's the difference between us."
"Of course that's the difference," rejoined Will a little doggedly. "I never know when to stop about anything, I'll be hanged if I do. It's my cursed luck to go at a headlong gait."
"And some day you'll get your neck broken. Well, be off now, or you'll most likely miss the stage."
He turned away to sort the young plants in his basket, while Will started at a brisk pace for the cross-roads.
The planting was tedious work, and it was almost evening before Christopher reached the end of the field and started home along the little winding lane. He had eaten a scant dinner with Molly, who had worried him by tearful complaints across the turnip salad. She had never looked prettier than in her thin white blouse, with her disordered curls shadowing her blue eyes, and he had never found her more frankly selfish. Her shallow-rooted nature awakened in him a feeling that was akin to repulsion, and he saw in imagination the gallant resolution with which Maria would have battled against such sordid miseries. At the first touch of her heroic spirit they would have been sordid no longer, for into the most squalid suffering her golden nature would have shed something of its sunshine. Beauty would have surrounded her, in Will's cabin as surely as in Blake Hall. And with the thought there came to him the knowledge, wrung from experience, that there are souls which do not yield to events, but bend and shape them into the likeness of themselves. No favouring circumstance could have evolved Maria out of Molly, nor could any crushing one have formed Molly from Maria's substance. The two women were as far asunder as the poles, united only by a certain softness of sex he found in them both.
The sun had dropped behind the pines and a gray mist was floating slowly across the level landscape. The fields were still in daylight, while dusk already enshrouded the leafy road, and it was from out the gloom that obscured the first short bend that he saw presently emerge the figure of a man who appeared to walk unsteadily and with an effort.
For an instant Christopher stopped short in the lane; then he went forward at a single impetuous stride.