e."

They rode in silence under the flowering locust-trees in the single
street, and then, crossing the grassy common, cantered between two
ripening fields of oats, and turned into the leafy freshness of the
Applegate road. The sun was high, but the long, still shadows had begun
to slant from the west, and the silence was brooding in a mellow light
over the distance.

"I don't know what we're coming to," said Gay at last, when they had
ridden a mile or two without speaking. What he really meant, though
he did not say it, was, "I don't know why in the devil's name you keep
thinking about that fellow?"

Though his own emotions were superior to reason, he was vaguely
irritated because Molly had allowed hers, even in a small matter, to
assert such a supremacy. He was accustomed to speak carelessly of
woman as "an emotional being," yet this did not prevent his feeling an
indignant surprise when woman, as occasionally happened, illustrated the
truth of his inherited generalization. A lover of the unconventional for
himself, he was almost as strong a hater of it for the women who were
related to him. It would have annoyed him excessively to see Kesiah make
herself conspicuous in any way, or deviate by a hair's breadth from the
accepted standard of her sex. And now Molly, with whom he had fallen
in love, had actually flushed and paled under his eyes at the sight of
young Revercomb! In some subtle manner she seemed to have stooped in his
estimation--to have lowered herself from the high and narrow pedestal
upon which he had placed her! Yet so contradictory are the passions,
that he felt he loved her the more, if possible, because of the angry
soreness at his heart.

Turning in the direction of Applegate, they continued their ride at
a canter, and the afternoon was over when they passed the cross-roads
again on their homeward way. A thin mist floated like thistledown from
the marshes, which were so distant that they were visible only as a
pinkish edge to the horizon. Large noisy insects, with iridescent wings,
hovered around the purple, heavy scented tubes of the Jamestown weeds by
the roadside, and the turnpike, glimmering like a white band through
the purple dusk, was spangled with fireflies. Gay was talking as they
approached the blazed pine, which stood out sinister and black against
the afterglow, and it was only when Molly cried out sharply that he saw
Blossom's face looking at them again over the tiger lilies.

"Why,