u were only a month old. Can't you forget it?"

"I'll never forget it--not even at the Day of Judgment. I don't care how
I'm punished."

Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him
to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While
she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told
himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of
the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her
impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her
kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities
against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance
she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While
she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every
phrase, in every gesture.

"It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something
in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very
strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to
them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.

"If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to
speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen."

He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry
light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she
had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap
of the mill.

For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For
God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I
find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?"

"I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."

"I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly."

"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the
hopper?"

"I shouldn't have cared--it would have been better than your expression
at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with
Judy Hatch, as I told you to."

"Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the
patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a
man just as soon as he happens to love you."

"I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away from
him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow,
"I've seen men like that a