obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck,
rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his
hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A
sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a
knife.

"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel,"
she said.

A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was
returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate
self-reproach why she had yielded to pity? She had felt sorry for Abel,
and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only
I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so
rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that
kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred.
I've got no belief in it--I've got no belief in anything, that is the
trouble. I'm twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the
mill-race."

A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came
the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low
rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the
old family carriage from Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies
on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with
shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's
physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle
patronage, if she would ride with the driver?

"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the