The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her forehead.
"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she answered, "but that if I ever did—-"
"Then you'd marry me."
"Well, if I were obliged to marry somebody, I'd rather marry you than anybody else."
"So you do like me a little?"
"Yes, I suppose I like you a little—but all men are the same—mother used always to tell me so."
Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of his paradise. He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met and passed through some hour of despair and disillusionment.
"But how could she judge, Molly? How could she judge?" he pleaded "She was ill, she wasn't herself, you must know it. All men are not alike. Didn't I fight her battles more than once, when you were a child?"
"I know, I know," she answered gratefully, "and I love you for it. That's why I don't mind telling you what I've never told a single one of the others. I haven't any heart, Abel, that's the truth. It's all play to me, and I like the game sometimes and sometimes I hate it. Yet, whether I like it or hate it, I always go on because I can't help it. Your mother once said I had a devil that drives me on and perhaps she was right—it may be that devil that drives me on and won't let me stop even when I'm tired, and it all bores me. The rector thinks that I'll marry him and turn pious and take to Dorcas societies, and Jim Halloween thinks I'll marry him and grow thrifty and take to turkey raising—and you believe in the bottom of your heart that in the end I'll fall into your arms and find happiness with your mother. But you're wrong—all—all—and I shan't do any of the things you expect of me. I am going to stay here as long as grandfather lives, so I can take care of him, and then I'll run off somewhere to the city and trim hats for a living. When I was at school in Applegate I trimmed hats for all of the pupils."
"Oh, Molly, Molly, I'll not give you up! Some day you'll see things differently."