“Haven’t I?  Well, you’re yourself, too, and yet you’re different.”

“Different?  I suppose you mean I’m wearing better clothes?”

He smiled for the first time.  “I wasn’t thinking about your clothes.  They never seemed to matter.”

What he had meant, though he dared not utter the thought aloud, was that she had grown softer and gentler, and was less the Molly of the flashing charm and the defiant challenge.

“Yes, I’ve changed in a way, of course,” she admitted presently, “I feel grown up now, and I never felt so before.  Life was all play to me until grandfather died.”

“And it isn’t now?”

“Not entirely—­I’m still growing.”

Her hand rested on the bars beside which she was standing, and the fragrant festoons of wild grape blooming beside the post, brushed softly against her bosom.  There was a quietness, a suggestion of restraint in her attitude which he had never seen in the old Molly.

“The day you went away you told me you wanted to live,” he said.

“I remember.  I couldn’t have done differently.  I had to find out things for myself.  Of course, life is all just the same everywhere, but then I didn’t know it.  I used to think that one had only to travel a certain distance and one would pass the boundary of the commonplace and come into the country of adventure.  It was silly, of course, but you see I didn’t know any better.  It was the fret of youth, I suppose, though people never seem to think that women ever feel it—­or, perhaps, as Mrs. Bottom used to say, it was only the Gay blood working off.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk of the Gay blood in you,” he said quickly.

His voice betrayed him, and looking up, she asked quietly, “How is Judy, Abel?”

“She’s not well.  It seems she suffers with her nerves.”

“I’m coming to see her.  Judy and I were always friends, you know.”

“Yes, I know.  You were a friend to every woman.”

“And I am still.  I’ve grown to love Aunt Kesiah, and I believe I’m the only person who sees just how fine she is.”

“Your grandfather saw, I think.  Do you remember he used to say life was always ready to teach us things, but that some of us were so mortal slow we never learned till we died?”

Her eyes were starry as she looked away from him over the meadow.  “Abel, I miss him so,” she said after a minute.

“I know, Molly, I know.”

“Nothing makes up for him.  All the rest seems so distant and unhuman.  Nothing is so real to me as the memory of him sitting in his chair on the porch with Spot at his feet.”

For a minute he did not reply, and when he spoke at last, it was only to say: 

“I wonder if a single human being could ever understand you, Molly?”

“I don’t understand myself.  I don’t even try.”

“You’ve had everything you could want for a year—­been everywhere—­seen everything—­yet, I believe, you’d give it all up to be back in the cottage over there with Reuben and his hound?”