When the door closed behind them Sarah looked at Blossom with an eloquent expression.  “Well, I never!” she exclaimed, and wrung the dough from her hands into the tray over which she was standing.  “Well I never!”

“I don’t believe it’s right for Abel to give in to Judy as he does,” said Blossom.

“I never saw a Revercomb that warn’t a fool about something,” answered Sarah.  “It don’t matter so much what ’tis about, but it’s obliged to be about something.”

Blossom sighed and bent lower over the seam she was running.  She had long since ceased to draw any consolation from her secret marriage, and her wedding ring (bought weeks after the ceremony by Gay) caused her pain rather than pleasure when it pressed into her bosom, where it hung suspended by a blue ribbon from her neck.  Her strong Saxon instinct for chastity—­for the integrity of feminine virtue—­sometimes awoke in her, and then she would think exultingly, “At least I am married!” But even this amazing triumph of morality—­of the spirit of Sarah Revercomb over the spirit of the elder Jonathan Gay—­showed pallid and bloodless beside the evanescent passion to which she had been sacrificed.  Destiny, working through her temperament, had marked her for victory, but it had been only one of those brief victories which herald defeats.  The forces of law and order—­the sound racial instincts which make for the preservation of society—­these had won in the event, though they had been, after all, powerless to change the ultimate issue.  The spirit of old Jonathan, as well as the spirit of Sarah, was immortal.  The racial battle between the soldier of fortune and the militant Calvinist was not yet fought to a finish.

“I believe Abel would give Judy the clothes on his back if he thought she wanted them,” said Blossom, in the effort to turn her musings away from her own troubles.

“It ain’t natural,” rejoined Sarah stubbornly.  “It’s a man’s natur to be mean about money matters whar his wife is concerned, an’ when he begins to be different it’s a sign that thar’s a screw loose somewhar inside of him.  My Abner was sech a spendthrift that he’d throw away a day’s market prices down at the or’nary, but he used to expect the money from a parcel of turkeys to keep me in clothes and medicines and doctor’s bills, to say nothin’ of household linen an’ groceries for the whole year round.”

Blossom sighed softly, “I don’t suppose there ever was a man who could see that a woman needed anything except presents now and then,” she said, “unless it’s Abel.  Do you know, grandma, I sometimes think he’s so kind to Judy because he knows he doesn’t love her.”

“Well, I reckon, if thar’s got to be a choice between love and kindness, I’d hold on to kindness,” retorted Sarah.

It was ten o’clock before Abel and Judy returned, and from the hurried and agitated manner of their entrance, it was plain that the Bible class had not altogether appeased Judy’s temper.