back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd
be sorry before you got up to the altar."

"I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but
I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it."

"You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle
down to raising chickens for a living?"

"I like raising chickens."

"And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would
sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you
please?"

"I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself,
as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the
same everywhere."

"The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any
difference?"

"No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier
things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk
than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and
never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single
subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks--they seem more human,
somehow."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what's got into you
to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you've begun to idealize the miller
now you've been away from him. He's a handsome fellow; you don't see
his physical match in a day, I'm willing to admit, but if you went back
again you'd be surprised to find how--well, how rustic he would appear
to you."

The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden
droop of her lashes.

"He's better than any one I've seen anywhere," she replied, "he's
bigger, he's stronger, he's kinder. I'm not good enough to marry him,
and I know it."

For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had
never indulged in verbal excesses. Then he said, coldly; "So you're
working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child,
if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more
absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in
order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing such folly was
intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant,
and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational
part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy
the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise
superior to reason.

"I d