on of a mental image of the world as he
imagined it. So, with an amiable word or two of regret that Providence
had arranged his removal to wider fields, he drove on, sitting very
erect and sawing earnestly at the mouth of the young horse.

"He's a first-rate parson, but a darn fool of a horseman," observed
Abel, with the disgust of a good driver for a poor one. "You'd better go
in and lie down, Judy, you look like a ghost."

"I don't want to lie down--I wish I were dead," replied Judy, choking
back her hysterical sobs. Then turning suddenly into the mill, she sank
against the old mill-stone on the wooden platform and burst into a fit
of wild and agonized weeping. Her hand, when he touched it, was as cold
as clay and as unresponsive to his.

"Judy," he said and his voice was wonderfully gentle, "does it really
mean so much to you? Are you honestly grieving like this about Mr.
Mullen?"

If he had only known it his gentleness to her was the thing for which
at times she almost hated him. The woman in her was very primitive--a
creature that harked back to the raw sensations of the jungle--and
nothing less than sheer brutality on Abel's part could free her from the
charm of the young clergyman's unconscious cruelty.

She looked up at him with accusing eyes, which said, "I don't care who
knows that I love him," as plainly as did her huddled and trembling
figure, clinging pathetically to the old mill-stone, as though it were
some crudely symbolic Rock of Ages which she embraced.

"Is it because he is going away or would you have felt this just as much
if he had stayed?" he asked, after a minute in which he had watched her
with humorous compassion.

Raising herself at the question, she pushed the damp hair from her
forehead, and sat facing him on the edge of the platform.

"I could have borne it--if--if I might have had his sermons every Sunday
to help me," she answered, and there was no consciousness of shame,
hardly any recognition of her abasement, in her tone. Like all helpless
victims of great emotions, she had ceased to be merely an individual and
had become the vehicle of some impersonal destructive force in nature.
It was not Judy, but the passion within her that was speaking through
her lips.

"But what good would they have done you? You would have been miserable
still."

"At--at least I should have seen him, an'--an' been strengthened in my
religion---"

The grotesque, the pitiless horror of it struck him