But Nature seldom suffers such high moments to pass before they have been paid for in physical values.  As the lovers passed into the turnpike, there came the sound of a horse at a trot, and a minute later Jonathan Gay rode toward them, leaning slightly over the neck of his bay.  Seeing them, he lifted his hat and brought down his horse to a walk, as if prompted by a sudden desire to look closer in Molly’s face.  Her rapture evidently became her, for after his first casual glance, he turned again quickly and smiled into her eyes.  Her look met his with the frankness of a child’s and taken unawares—­pleased, too, that he should so openly admire her—­she smiled back again with the glow of her secret happiness enriching her beauty.

In a moment Gay had passed on, and turning to Abel, she saw that a frown darkened his features.

“He had no right to look at you like that, and you oughtn’t to have smiled back, Molly,” he said sternly.

Her nature leaped instantly to arms.  “I suppose I’ve a right to my smiles,” she retorted defiantly.

“No you haven’t—­not now.  An engaged woman ought to be proper and sober—­anybody will tell you so—­ask Mr. Mullen.  A girl may flirt a little and nobody thinks any harm of it, but it’s different afterwards, and you know it.”

“I know nothing of the kind, and I refuse to be preached to.  I might as well marry Mr. Mullen.”

The taunt, though it was uttered half in jest, appeared to torment him beyond endurance.

“How can you talk to me like this, after what you said five minutes ago?” he demanded.

His tone approached, unfortunately, the ministerial, and as he spoke, her anger flamed over her as hotly as her happiness had done a few minutes earlier.

“That was five minutes ago,” she retorted with passion.

Stopping in the road, he caught her arms and held them to her sides, while the thunder cloud blackened his forehead.  Two playthings of Nature, swept alternately by the calm and the storm of elemental forces, they faced each other in the midst of mating birds and insects that were as free as they.

“Do you mean that you’ve changed, and in five minutes?” he asked.

“I’ve always told you I could change in three,” she retorted.

“I don’t believe it—­you are behaving foolishly.”

“And you are wise, I suppose—­preaching and prating to me as if you stood in the pulpit.  When you were begging me so humbly for a kind word, I might have known that as soon as you got the kind word, you’d begin to want to manage me body and soul—­that’s a man all over.”

“I merely said that an engaged woman ought not to smile too free at other men—­and that you ought not to even more than others, because there is something so inviting about you.  Mr. Mullen would say the same thing from the pulpit—­and what one man can say in the pulpit, I reckon, another may repeat in the road.”