The hint of his "entanglement," she had accepted quite simply as a veiled allusion to an incident in his life abroad. Her interest in it would have been keener had she been less indifferent to him as a lover, but while she walked by his side, smiling in response to his words, she was thinking breathlessly, like one hushed in suspense, "If Abel had only been like that a year ago, I should not have left him." That the qualities she had always missed in the miller had developed only through the loss of her, she refused to admit. A swift, an almost miraculous change had passed over her, and all the warm blood in her body seemed to rush back to her heart, giving it the abundance of life. The world appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy places of the Haunt's Walk. "Yes, if he had been like that I should never have left him and all this would not have happened," she thought again; "and if I had been like this would he ever have quarrelled with me?" she asked herself the instant afterwards.
And Gay, walking at her side, but separated by a mental universe, was thinking resentfully, "The deuce of it is that it might just as well never have happened! If I'd only been a little less of a fool—If I'd only not walked my horse across the pasture that October afternoon—If I'd only had sense enough to see what was coming—If I'd only—oh, hang it!"
"I'd be a better man to-day if I'd known you sooner, Molly," he said presently. "A man couldn't tire of you because you're never the same thing two days in succession."
"Doesn't a man tire of change?"
"I don't—it's the most blessed thing in life. I wonder why you've given up flirting?"
"Perhaps because there isn't anybody to flirt with."
"I like that. Am I not continually at your service?"
"But I don't like your kind of flirting, somehow."
"What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens. Have you seen him, by the way?"
"He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the
Bible. I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch."