himself passionately that there was nothing ahead of him—­nothing to look forward to.  Vaguely he realized that inconsistent and irreconcilable as his actions appeared, they had been, in fact, held together by a single, connecting thread, that one dominant feeling had inspired all of his motives.  If he had never loved Molly, he saw clearly now, he should never have rushed into his marriage with Judy.  Pity had driven him first in the direction of love—­he remembered the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken Janet—­and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his marriage.  All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.

“Poor Judy,” he said aloud after a minute, “she deserves to be happy and I’m going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so.”

And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer to his resolve, a memory of the past so vivid that it seemed to exist not only in his thoughts, but in the radiant autumn fields at which he was looking.  All the old passionate sweetness, as sharp as pain, appeared to float there in the Indian summer before him.  Rapture or agony?  He could not tell, but he knew that he had lost it forever.

Turning away, he recrossed the log, and stood for a moment, hesitating, with his hand on the gate.  A decrepit figure, hobbling with bent head through a golden cloud of dust, signed to him to stop, and while he waited, he made out the person of old Adam, slightly the worse, he gathered, for the wedding feast.

“I tarried thar till the last, hopin’ to have still another taste of toddy,” remarked the aged merrymaker.  “When a man has turned ninety he might as well cease to take thought for his morals, an’ let the natchel bent of ’em have a chance.”

It was plain that his last glass had been too much for him, and that, for the first time in his temperate career, he was rapidly approaching a condition of alcoholic ecstasy.

“You’d better go home and take a nap,” said Abel kindly.  “You can’t very well get lost between here and your house, or I’d go with you.”

“It warn’t the weddin’ glass that was too much for me,” replied the old man at the point of tears, “’twas the one I had arterwards at the or’nary.  Not wishin’ to depart from an old custom on account of a rare festival, I stopped at Mrs. Bottom’s just as young Mr. Jonathan an’ Reuben Merryweather’s gal drove up from Applegate.  Ah, sech a sight as she was—­all in shot silk that rustled when you looked at it—­an’ as pretty as a pictur.”

“So they’ve come back?” asked Abel, almost in a whisper.

“Yes, they’ve come back, an’ a sad comin’ it was for her, as I could see in her face.  ‘What are you wearin’ yo’ Sunday best for, Mr. Doolittle?’ asked Mr. Jonathan, spry as a cricket.  ‘It’s a fine weddin’ I’ve been to, Mr. Jonathan,’ I answered, ‘an’ I’ve seen two lovin’ hearts beatin’ as one befo’ Mr. Mullen at the altar.’  Then Reuben Merryweather’s gal called out right quickly, ‘Whose weddin’, old Adam?’ an’ when I replied, ‘Abel Revercomb’s,’ as I was bound to, her face went as white as a han’t right thar befo’ me—–­”