"No, I like you as you are—only let me smooth your hair a little. Run ahead, Patsey, and say we're both coming."
Slipping her arm in his, she led him through the orchard, where the bluebirds were fluting blissfully in the apple-trees. To the heart of each spring was calling—but to Molly it meant promise and to Reuben remembrance. Though the bluebirds sang only one song, they brought to the old man and to the girl a different music.
"I've sometimes thought Mr. Mullen better suited to you than Abel, Molly," said Reuben presently, uttering an idea that had come to him more than once. "If you'd been inclined to fancy him, I don't believe either Mrs. Gay or Miss Kesiah could have found any fault with him."
"But you know I couldn't care for him, grandfather," protested Molly impatiently. "He is like one of Mrs. Bottom's air plants that grow without any roots."
"Well, he's young yet an' his soul struts a trifle, but wait till he's turned fifty an' he'll begin to be as good a Christian as he is a parson. It's a good mould, but he congealed a bit too stiff when he was poured into it."
They reached the grape arbour as he finished, and a minute later Abednego lead them into the library, where Kesiah placed Reuben in a comfortable chair and hastened to bring him a glass of wine from the sideboard. At Molly's entrance, Gay and Mr. Chamberlayne came forward to shake hands with her, while Mrs. Gay looked up from her invalid's couch and murmured her name in a gentle, reproachful voice. The pale blue circles around the little lady's eyes and faintly smiling mouth were the only signs of the blighting experience through which she had passed. As she turned her angelic gaze on old Jonathan's daughter there was not an instant's doubt in the minds of those about her that she would accept the blow with the suffering sweetness that enhanced her beauty.
"We wanted to give you a little reminder of us on your birthday, Molly," she said, taking up an amethyst cross on a slender chain from the table beside her, "and Jonathan thought you would like a trinket to wear with your white dresses."
"I was right, wasn't I, cousin?" asked Gay, with his genial smile.
Mrs. Gay flushed slightly at the word, while Reuben cast a grateful glance at him over the untasted glass of wine in his hand.
Without drawing a step nearer, Molly stood there in the centre of the room, nervously twisting her handkerchief in and out of her fingers. She was physically cramped by her surroundings, and the reproachful gentleness in Mrs. Gay's face embarrassed her only less than did the intimate pleasantry of Jonathan's tone. Every detail of the library—the richness and heaviness of the furniture, the insipid fixed smiles in the family portrait, the costly fragility of the china ornaments—all these seemed to unite in some occult power which overthrew her self-possession and paralyzed her emotions.