With the key of the mill in his hand, Abel stopped to gaze over the green knoll where he had once planned to build his house. Beyond it he saw the strip of pines, and he knew that the tallest of the trees had fallen uselessly beneath his axe. The great trunk still lay there, fast rotting to dust on the carpet of pine cones. He had never sold it for timber. He would never use it for the rafters of his home.
As he looked back now all that past life of his appeared to him fair and desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood, and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its fullest—that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the past, and he thought of himself as always eager and enthusiastic then, as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year when he had gone away, and worked in the factory in order to educate himself, was revealed as a period of delightful promise, of wonderful opportunity. In remembering his love for Molly, he forgot the quarrels, the jealousies, the heartburnings, and recalled only the exquisite instant of their first lover's kiss. Then, he told himself, that even while he had enjoyed his life, it had cheated him, and he would not live it over again if he could.
Turning presently in the other direction, he discerned a patch of vivid blue in the pasture, and knew that it was Blossom crossing the fields to Solomon Hatch's. "She's gone a good piece out of her road," he thought, and then, "I wonder why she doesn't marry? She might have anybody about here if she wasn't so particular." The vivid blue spot in the midst of the russet and brown landscape held his gaze for a moment; then calling Moses to his side, he unlocked the door of the mill and began counting the sacks of grist.
Outside, in the high wind, which made walking difficult, Blossom moved in the direction of the willow copse. Gay had promised to meet her, but she knew, from the experience of the last few months, that he would neither hasten his luncheon nor smoke a cigar the less in order to do so. As she pressed on the wind sang in her ears. She heard it like the sound of rushing wings in the broomsedge, and when it died down, she waited for it to rise again with a silken murmur in the red-topped orchard grass. She could tell from the sound whether the gust was still in the field of broomsedge or had swept on to the pasture.
In spite of her blue dress, in spite of the flush in her cheeks and the luminous softness in her eyes, the joy in her bosom fluttered on crippled wings. Gay was kind, he was gentle, he was even solicitous on the rare occasions when she saw him; but somehow—in some way, it was different from the ideal marriage of which she had dreamed. If he was kind, he was also casual. She had hoped once that love would fill her life, and now, to her despair, it looked as if it might be poured into a tea-cup. She had imagined that it would move mountains, and the most ordinary detail of living was sufficient to thrust it out of sight.
When she reached the brook, she saw Gay coming slowly along the Haunt's Walk, to the spring. As he walked, he blew little clouds of smoke into the air, and she thought, as he approached her, that the smell of his cigar was unlike the cigar of any other man she knew—that it possessed, in itself, a quality that was exciting and romantic. This trait in his personality—a disturbing suggestion of the atmosphere of a richer world—had fascinated her from the beginning, and after eighteen months of repeated disappointments, it still held her, though she struggled now in its power like a hare in a trap.
"So you're here!" he exclaimed as he reached her. Then, after a swift glance over the fields, he drew her into the shelter of the trees, and holding his cigar in his left hand, kissed her lips.
Closing her eyes, she leaned against him, while the scent of tobacco intoxicated her with its train of happier associations.
"You're looking all right, though your letters have been rather jumpy. My dear girl, when you pounce on me like that you frighten me out of my wits. You really mustn't, you know."
"O Jonathan!" she gasped, and clung to him.