embered this now, she realized that her
feeling about their meeting had changed during the last few hours. She
liked Gay--she responded to his physical charm, to the indefinable air
of adventure which hangs sometimes about men who have lived hard without
wasting their surplus vitality--but in spite of the strong attraction he
possessed for her, she knew that in her heart she had never thoroughly
believed in him. Unconsciously to herself she had measured his stature
against Abel's and he had come short of her standard.

"Molly," asked Mrs. Gay, turning her head suddenly, "did you write
Jonathan to expect us by this train?"

"Yes, Aunt Angela, he knows we are coming. Shall I lower the shade? Is
the sunlight too strong on you?"

"A little," murmured Mrs. Gay in a tone of resigned sweetness and the
conversation was over.

At the sound of Molly's voice an old lady, travelling South with a
trained nurse, turned in her chair, and looked at the girl as she might
have looked at a fruit for which she longed, but which she had been
forbidden to touch. Her face, under an elaborate bonnet trimmed with
artificial purple wistaria, was withered and crossed with lines, and her
poor old hands were so knotted from gout that she could hardly lift the
tea-cup from the small table which had been fastened in front of her.
Yet for one instant, as she gazed on Molly's girlish freshness, her
youth stirred feebly somewhere in the dregs of her memory, and her eyes
grew deprecating and piteous, as though her soul were saying, "I know I
have missed it, but it isn't my fault---"

The tea-cup trembled in her hand, and her old lips fumbled pathetically
for her bit of toast, while across from her, with only the narrow aisle
of the car between, youth incarnate sat weaving its separate dream of a
universe.

"Yes, two hours earlier," ran Molly's thoughts, "I looked forward to
the meeting with Jonathan, and now, in so short a time, I have grown to
dread it." She tried to think of his pleasant, well-coloured face, of
his whimsical, caressing smile, but in the niche where his image should
have stood, she saw Abel in his country clothes, with his red-brown
throat rising out of his blue shirt and his brilliant eyes under the
dark hair on his forehead. Then suddenly memory played her a ridiculous
trick, for she remembered that his hair grew in a close clipped circular
wave, like the hair which has been bound by a fillet on the head of a
child.

"I wonde