She went in, returning a minute later, with the black things still over her arm, and a deeper frown on her forehead.
"No—I'm sorry, but she doesn't wish to see any one. You know, the old hound died the same night, and that has added to her sorrow."
"Perhaps if I come back later?"
"Perhaps; I am not sure. As soon as the funeral is over she will come to us. You have heard, I suppose, of the change in—in her circumstances?"
"Then it is true? I heard it, but I didn't believe it."
Molly had fled suddenly into remoteness—not Reuben's death, but Mr. Jonathan's "provision," had swept her away from him. Like other mortals in other crises of experience, she was aware of a helpless, a rebellious, realization of the power, not of fate, but of money. No other accident of fortune could have detached her so completely from the surroundings in which he had known her. Though he told himself that to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid brutality of soul, he revolted the next instant from the idea that his love should demand so great a sacrifice. Like the majority of men who have risen to comparative comfort out of bitter poverty, he had at the same time a profound contempt and an inordinate respect for the tangible fact of money—a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the symbol. Sarah's hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in his character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to think lightly of renouncing—or of inviting another to renounce—an income of ten thousand dollars a year. He might dream that love would bring happiness, but she was reasonably assured that money would bring comfort. Between the dream and the assurance there would have been, in Sarah's mind at least, small room left for choice. He had known few women, and for one dreadful minute he asked himself, passionately, if Molly and his mother could be alike?
Unconsciously to himself his voice when he spoke again had lost its ring of conviction.
"Perhaps I may see her later?" he repeated.
"The funeral will be to-morrow. You will be there?"
"Yes, I'll be there," he replied; and then because there was nothing further for him to say, he bowed over his hat, and went down the flagged walk to the orchard, where the bluebirds were still singing. His misery appeared to him colossal—of a size that overshadowed not only the spring landscape, but life itself. He tried to remember a time when he was happy, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination at the moment, and it seemed to him that he had plodded on year after year with a leaden weight oppressing his heart.