For a moment the throbbing of her heart stifled her. Then she found her voice.
"If I had the choice now I'd choose Old Church and the grist mill," she said.
There was a short silence, and while it lasted she waited trembling, her hand outstretched, her mouth quivering for his kisses. She remembered how eagerly his lips had turned to hers in the past as one who thirsted for water.
But when he spoke again it was in the same quiet voice.
"Would you, Molly!" he answered gently, and that was all. It was not a question, but an acceptance. He made no movement toward her. His eyes did not search her face.
They turned and walked slowly across the pasture over the life-everlasting, which diffused under their feet a haunting and ghostly fragrance. Myriads of grasshoppers chanted in the warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint purple haze on the horizon.
"If I could change it all now—could take you out of the life that suits you and bring you back to the mill—I wouldn't do it. I like to think I'm decent enough not even to want to do it," he said.
They had reached the fence that separated Gay's pasture from his, and stopping, he held out his hand with a smile.
"I hear you're to marry Jonathan Gay," he added, "and whether or not you do, God bless you."
"But I'm not, Abel!" she cried passionately as he turned away.