a frown overshadowed her features.

"They're all alike," she retorted scornfully. "If you go over to the
mill you'll probably find Abel Revercomb sulking and brow-beating his
mother because I smiled at you this afternoon. And I did it only to
plague him!"

"Molly's a good girl," said Reuben, rather as if he expected the
assertion to be disputed, "but she was taught to despise folks when she
was a baby--wasn't you, pretty?"

"Not you--never you, grandfather."

The intimate nature of the conversation grated upon Gay not a little.
There was something splendidly barbaric about the girl, and yet the
mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly
rather than otherwise. His ideal woman--the woman of the early Victorian
period--was submissive and clinging. He was perfectly assured that
she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with
humility. Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental and
facial expression for the sex; and that a woman should resent appeared
almost as indelicate as that she should propose.

When supper was over, and Reuben had settled to his pipe, with the old
hound at his feet, Molly took down a bunch of keys from a nail in the
wall, and lit a lantern with a taper which she selected from a china
vase on the mantelpiece. Once outside she walked a little ahead of Gay
and the yellow blaze of the lantern flitted like a luminous bird over
the flagged walk bordered by gooseberry bushes. Between the stones,
which were hollowed by the tread of generations, nature had embroidered