With her hands clasped on the cage of the canary, she gazed thoughtfully at Kesiah, who was sitting a little in front of her, with her eyeglasses on her nose and the daily paper opened before her.  Gay was to meet them in Richmond, and as Molly remembered this now, she realized that her feeling about their meeting had changed during the last few hours.  She liked Gay—­she responded to his physical charm, to the indefinable air of adventure which hangs sometimes about men who have lived hard without wasting their surplus vitality—­but in spite of the strong attraction he possessed for her, she knew that in her heart she had never thoroughly believed in him.  Unconsciously to herself she had measured his stature against Abel’s and he had come short of her standard.

“Molly,” asked Mrs. Gay, turning her head suddenly, “did you write Jonathan to expect us by this train?”

“Yes, Aunt Angela, he knows we are coming.  Shall I lower the shade?  Is the sunlight too strong on you?”

“A little,” murmured Mrs. Gay in a tone of resigned sweetness and the conversation was over.

At the sound of Molly’s voice an old lady, travelling South with a trained nurse, turned in her chair, and looked at the girl as she might have looked at a fruit for which she longed, but which she had been forbidden to touch.  Her face, under an elaborate bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria, was withered and crossed with lines, and her poor old hands were so knotted from gout that she could hardly lift the tea-cup from the small table which had been fastened in front of her.  Yet for one instant, as she gazed on Molly’s girlish freshness, her youth stirred feebly somewhere in the dregs of her memory, and her eyes grew deprecating and piteous, as though her soul were saying, “I know I have missed it, but it isn’t my fault—–­”

The tea-cup trembled in her hand, and her old lips fumbled pathetically for her bit of toast, while across from her, with only the narrow aisle of the car between, youth incarnate sat weaving its separate dream of a universe.

“Yes, two hours earlier,” ran Molly’s thoughts, “I looked forward to the meeting with Jonathan, and now, in so short a time, I have grown to dread it.”  She tried to think of his pleasant, well-coloured face, of his whimsical, caressing smile, but in the niche where his image should have stood, she saw Abel in his country clothes, with his red-brown throat rising out of his blue shirt and his brilliant eyes under the dark hair on his forehead.  Then suddenly memory played her a ridiculous trick, for she remembered that his hair grew in a close clipped circular wave, like the hair which has been bound by a fillet on the head of a child.