inary,
they turned into the Applegate road, the heavy shade brought a sensation
of relief, and the face which had seemed to start out of the blanched
fields, faded slowly away from her.

As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear
Abel's speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish
that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the
last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool
determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness,
had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at
once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion
against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the
incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now
that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the
will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly
into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.

"I don't believe I'll stay, after all, Jonathan," she said weakly. "It's
so hot and I don't really want to hear him."

"But we're here now, Molly, and he's already begun." Against the
feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he
opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the
trouble. "It's over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he
pursued. "Come on. We needn't dismount if you don't feel like it--but
I've a curiosity to know what he's talking about."

Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she
had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing
the miller. Abel's ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his
class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of
political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he
would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the
higher to the lower classes. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the
miller's raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable
and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest
and tolerant amusement.

"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we'll stop by the fence
under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us."

As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly
hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then