distances. Somewhere, he felt sure, either in his orbit or hers, there
must be a point where Dorothy would be less insensible to the attraction
of atoms in the mass. Thus far she had reversed the laws of the spheres,
and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold a
permanent place in his thoughts he had invested her with something of that
atmosphere of peace and cool passivity which hedges in the women of her
faith. It had been like a thin, clear glass, revealing her loveliness,
but cutting off the magnetic currents. A young man is not long satisfied
with the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is their
object. Evesham had grown impatient; he had broken the spell of her
sweet remoteness. He had touched her and found her human, deliciously,
distractingly human, but with a streak of that obduracy which history
has attributed to the Quakers under persecution. In vain he haunted the
mill-dam, and bribed the boys with traps and pop-guns, and lingered at the
well-curb to ask Dorothy for water that did not reach his thirst. She was
there in the flesh, with her arms aloft balancing the well-sweep, while he
stooped with his lips at the bucket; but in spirit she was unapproachable.
He felt, with disgust at his own persistence, that she even grudged him the
water. He grew savage and restless, and fretted over the subtle changes
that he counted in Dorothy as the summer waned. She was thinner and paler;
perhaps with the heats of harvest, which had not, indeed, been burdensome
from its abundance. Her eyes were darker and shyer, and her voice more
languid. Was she wearing down with all this work and care? A fierce disgust
possessed him that this sweet life should be cast into the breach between
faith and works.

He did not see that Rachel Barton had changed, too, with a change that
meant more, at her age, than Dorothy's flushings and palings. He did not
miss the mother's bent form from the garden, or the bench by the kitchen
door where she had been used to wash the milk-things.