"What do you know of the Revercombs, Kesiah? Are they in any degree above the common people about here?"
"The miller is a rather extraordinary character, I believe," she answered, lifting the spoon out of the dish of tomatoes as it was handed to her, and then shaking her head with a sigh and letting it fall. "Mr. Chamberlayne says he is quite well educated, but the rest of them, of course, are very primitive and plain. They have always been strait-laced and honest and I hear that the mother—she came from Piping Tree and was one of the Hawtreys—is violently opposed to her son's marriage with Molly Merryweather. There is a daughter, also, who is said to be beautiful though rather dull."
"Yes, I've seen the girl," observed Mrs. Gay, "heavy and blond, isn't she? The mother, I should say, is decidedly the character of the family. She has rather terrible convictions, and once a great many years ago, she came over here—forced her way into my sick-room to rebuke me about the behaviour of the servants or something. Your Uncle Jonathan was obliged to lead her out and pacify her—she was quite upset, I remember. By the way, Kesiah," she pursued, "haven't I heard that Mr. Mullen is attentive to the daughter? It seems a pity, for he is quite a superior young man—his sermons are really remarkable, and he might easily have done better."
"Oh, that was when he first came here, Angela, before he met Molly Merryweather. It's singular the fascination that girl possesses for the men around here."
Gay laughed shortly. "Well, it's a primitive folk, isn't it?" he said, "and gets on my nerves after a while."
Through the afternoon he was restless and out of humour, tormented less by the memory of Blossom's face than by the little brown mole on her cheek. He resolved a dozen times a day that he would not see her, and in the very act of resolving, he would begin to devise means of waylaying her as she went down to the store or passed to and from the pasture. A certain sex hatred, which is closely allied to the mere physical fact of love, asserted itself at times, and he raged hotly against her coldness, her indifference, against the very remoteness that attracted him. Then he would soften to her, and with the softening there came always the longing not only to see, but to touch her—to breathe her breath, to lay his hand on her throat.
The next day he went to the willow copse, but she did not come. On the one following, he took down his gun and started out to shoot partridges, but when the hour of the meeting came, he found himself wandering over the fields near the Revercombs' pasture with his eye on the little path down which she had come that rimy October morning. The third afternoon, when he had watched for her in a fury of disappointment, he ordered his horse and went for a gallop down the sunken road to the mill. At the first turn, where the woods opened into a burned out clearing, he came suddenly upon her, and the hunger at his heart gave place to a delicious sense of fulfilment.
"Blossom, how can you torture me so?" he exclaimed when he had dismounted at her side and flung his arm about her.
She drew slowly away, submissive even in her avoidance.
"I did not mean to torture you—I'm sorry," she answered humbly.