to
Jordan's Journey. Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she
looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up
at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he
could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday.

Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp
with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly
returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture.

"I thought you had gone," he said, and held out his hand.

"Not yet. Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October."

In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in
which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight.

"Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day in
June?" she asked suddenly.

"I didn't know it, but it was nice of you."

His renunciation had conferred a dignity upon him which had in it
something of the quiet and the breadth of the Southern landscape. She
knew while she looked at him that he had accepted her decision once for
all--that he still accepted it in spite of the ensuing logic of events
which had refuted its finality. The choice had been offered her between
love and the world, and she had chosen the world--chosen in the heat of
youth, in the thirst for experience. She had not loved enough. Her
love had been slight, young, yielding too easily to the impact of other
desires. There had been no illusion to shelter it. She had never, she
remembered now, had any illusions--all had been of the substance and the
fibre of reality. Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she
had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized
that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it
differently. At the time flight from love was as necessary to her growth
as the return to love was necessary to her happiness to-day. She saw
clearly that her return was, after all, the result of her flight. If
she had not chosen the world, she would never have known how little the
world signified in comparison with simpler things. Life was all of a
single piece; it was impossible to pull it apart and say "without this
it would have been better"--since nothing in it was unrelated to the
rest, nothing in it existed by itself and independent of the events that
preceded it and came after it. Born as she had been out of sin, and the
tragic expiation of sin,