Her mother’s face went pale under its red bronze.

“I mean this,” broke out the girl, still in the strained high tones that betokened her mental state:  “I’ll marry no man in any halfway fashion!  Why didn’t you tell me?  Why didn’t I think?  How could I have forgotten?  Law, organization, society, convention, form, custom—­haven’t I got even those things to back me?  No?  Then I’ve nothing!  It was—­it was those things—­form, custom—­that I was going to have to support me.  I’ve got nothing else.  Gone—­they’re gone, too!  And you ask me to marry him—­provisionally—­provisionally!  Oh, my God! what awful thing was this?  I wasn’t even to have that solid thing to rest on, back of me, after it all was over!”

They stood looking at her for a time, trying to catch and weigh her real intent, to estimate what it might mean as to her actions.

“Like images, you are!” she went on hysterically, her physical craving for one man, her physical loathing of another, driving her well-nigh mad.  “You wouldn’t protect your own daughter!”—­to her stupefied parents.  “Must I think for you at this hour of my life?  How near—­oh, how near!  But not now—­not this way!  No!  No!”

“What do you mean, Molly?” demanded her father sternly.  “Come now, we’ll have no woman tantrums at this stage!  This goes on!  They’re waiting!  He’s waiting!”

“Let him wait!” cried the girl in sudden resolution.  All her soul was in the cry, all her outraged, self-punished heart.  Her philosophy fell from her swiftly at the crucial moment when she was to face the kiss, the embrace of another man.  The great inarticulate voice of her woman nature suddenly sounded, imperative, terrifying, in her own ears—­“Oh, Will Banion, Will Banion, why did you take away my heart?” And now she had been on the point of doing this thing!  An act of God had intervened.

Jesse Wingate nodded to the minister.  They drew apart.  The holy man nodded assent, hurried away—­the girl sensed on what errand.

“No use!” she said.  “I’ll not!”

Stronger and stronger in her soul surged the yearning for the dominance of one man, not this man yonder—­a yearning too strong now for her to resist.

“But Molly, daughter,” her mother’s voice said to her, “girls has—­girls does.  And like he said, it’s the promise, it’s the agreement they both make, with witnesses.”

“Yes, of course,” her father chimed in.  “It’s the consent in the contract when you stand before them all.”

“I’ll not stand before them.  I don’t consent!  There is no agreement!”

Suddenly the girl reached out and caught from her mother the pitiful little bride’s bouquet.

“Look!” she laughed.  “Look at these!”

One by one, rapidly, she tore out and flung down the folded gentian flowers.

“Closed, closed!  When the night came, they closed!  They couldn’t!  They couldn’t!  I’ll not—­I can’t!”