ion of alarm, Molly turned her horse's head in the
direction of the pine, but with a hasty yet courteous gesture, Gay rode
quickly ahead of her, and leaning from his saddle spoke a few words in
an undertone. The next instant Blossom had fled and the two were riding
on again down the turnpike.

"She looked so unhappy, Jonathan. I wonder what was the matter?"

"She was tired, probably." He despised himself for the evasion, for
his character was naturally an open one, and he heartily disliked
all subterfuge. Yet he implied the falsehood even while he hated the
necessity which forced him to it. So all his life he had done the things
that he condemned, condemning himself because he did them. For more
than a year now he had lived above a continuous undercurrent of
subterfuge--he had lied to Blossom, he had deceived his mother, he had
wilfully encouraged Molly to believe a falsehood--and yet all the time,
he was conscious that his nature preferred the honourable and the candid
course. His intentions were still honest, but long ago in his boyhood,
when he had first committed himself to impulse, he had prepared the way
for his subsequent failures. To-day, with a weakened will, with an ever
increasing sensitiveness of his nervous system, he knew that he should
go on desiring the good while he compromised with the pleasanter aspect
of evil.

"She wouldn't speak to me," said Molly, "I can't understand it. What did
you say to her?"

"I asked her if she were ill and if we could do anything for her."

"I can't get over her look. I wish I had jumped down and run after her,
but she went off so quickly."

So intense was the sunshine that it appeared to burn into the white
streak of the road, where the dust floated like some smoke on the
breathless air. From the scorched hedges of sumach and bramble, a chorus
of grasshoppers was cheerfully giving praise to a universe that ignored
it.

As Molly rode silently at Gay's side, it seemed to her that Blossom's
startled face looked back at her from the long, hot road, from the waste
of broomsedge, from the cloudless sky, so bright that it hurt her eyes.
It was always there wherever she turned: she could not escape it. A
sense of suffocation in the midst of space choked back the words she
would have spoken, and she felt that the burning dust, which hung low
over the road, had drifted into her brain and obscured her thoughts as
it obscured the objects around her. When, after passing the ord