"But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it. She has never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself."
"Poor Aunt Kesiah," said Molly softly.
He glanced at her sharply. "Why do you say that?" he asked, "she has always seemed to me to have everything she wanted. If she hadn't had mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?"
"I wonder?" she returned; "but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt
Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?"
"Well, rather. What are you driving at?"
Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words, appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated Kesiah's generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen whose infinite variety he could not exhaust. The mere recollection of the others wearied him. Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an allurement to his senses. The idea that this might be love, after all, had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that "he hadn't it in him." Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him over the jewelled landscape, and the heavens had opened. Once more the unattainable had appeared to him wrapped in the myriad-coloured veil of his young illusions.
"Molly," he said almost in spite of himself, "what would have happened to us if we had met five or six years ago?"
"Nothing, probably."
"Well, I'm not so sure—not if you like me half as well as I like you.
You understand, don't you, that I got myself tied up—entangled before
I knew you—but, by Jove, if I were free I'd make you think twice about
me."
"There's no use talking about what might have been, is there?"