ly at your service?"

"But I don't like your kind of flirting, somehow."

"What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens. Have you
seen him, by the way?"

"He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the
Bible. I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch."

"And the miller?"

She was walking beside a clump of lilies, and the colour of the flowers
flamed in her face.

"I saw him for a few minutes this morning."

"How has his marriage turned out?"

"I haven't heard. Like all the others, I suppose."

"Well he's as fine a looking animal as one often encounters. His wife is
that thin, drawn out, anaemic girl I saw at Piping Tree, isn't she? Such
men always seem to marry such women."

"I never thought Judy unattractive. She's really interesting if you take
the trouble to dig deep enough."

"I suppose Revercomb dug, but it isn't as a rule a man's habit to go
around with a spade when he's in want of a wife."

With an impetuous movement, he bent closer to her:

"Look here, Molly, don't you think you might kiss me?"

"I told you the first time I ever saw you that I didn't care for
kissing."

"Well, even if you don't care, can't you occasionally be generous?
You've got a colour in your cheeks like red flowers."

"Oh, have I?"

"The trouble is, I've gone and fallen in love with you and it's turning
my head."

"I don't think it will hurt you, Jonathan."

She broke away from him before he could detain her, and while a protest
was still on his lips, ran up the walk and under the grape arbour into
the back door of the house.

Left to himself, Gay wheeled about and passed into the side-garden,
where he found Kesiah snipping off withered roses with a pair of pruning
shears.

At his approach, she paused in her task and stood waiting for him, with
the expression of interested, if automatic, attention, which appeared on
her face, as in answer to some secret spring, whenever she was invited
to perform the delicate part of a listener. She had attained at last
that battered yet smiling acquiescence in the will of Providence which
has been eloquently praised, under different names, by both theologians
and philosophers. From a long and uncomplaining submission to boredom,
she had arrived at a point of blessedness where she was unable to be
bored at all. Out of the furnace of a too ardent youth, her soul had
escaped into the agreeable, if foggy, atmosphere of middle age. Peace
had bee