"I can't understand--oh, Molly, don't you see I am in torment?" he cried. But the veil of softness was gone now, and the cruelty that is bound up in some inexplicable way in all violent emotion--even in the emotion of love--showed itself on the surface. "Then stay there, for you've made it for yourself," she answered, and turned away from him. As his voice called her again, she broke into a run, flying before him over the green meadow until she reached the lawn of Jordan's Journey, and his pursuit ended. Then, hurrying through the orchard and up the flagged walk, she ascended the steps, and bent over Reuben in his chair. "Grandfather, I am back. Are you asleep?" The robin that had flown from the railing at her approach swung on the bough of an apple-tree and regarded her with attention. "Grandfather," she said again, touching him, "oh, grandfather, wake up!" CHAPTER XX LIFE'S IRONIES When he came down to breakfast next morning, Abel heard of Reuben's death from his mother. "Well, you can't tell who's goin' to be the next," she concluded grimly, as she poured the coffee. In spite of her austere manner and her philosophical platitude, Sarah was more moved in her heart than she had dared to confess. From the moment that she had heard of Reuben's death--when she had gone over with some of her mourning to offer Molly--she had ceased to think of him as an old man, and her mind had dwelt upon him as one who had been ruthlessly cut off in his prime--as he might have been had the end come some thirty or forty years before. Memory, that great miracle worker, had contrived to produce this illusion; and all Sarah's hard common sense could not prevent her feeling an indignant pity because Reuben's possibilities of happiness had been unfulfilled. Trouble after trouble and never anything to make up for them, and then to go this way while he was resting! "It's like that," she thought bitterly to herself, alluding to life. "It's like that!" And it seemed to her suddenly that the whole of existence was but a continual demonstration of the strong religious dogmas on which her house of faith had been reared. When you looked around you, she thought, with triumph, there wasn't any explanation of the seeming injustice except original sin. There was a strange comfort in this conviction, as though it represented the single reality to which she could cling amid the mutable deceptions of life. "Thar wouldn't be any sense in it if 'twarn't for that," she would sometimes say to herself, as one who draws strength from a secret source of refreshment. In Abel the news of Reuben's death awoke a different emotion, and his first thought was of Molly. He longed to comfort her in his arms, and the memory of the quarrel of yesterday and even of the kiss that led to it seemed to increase rather than diminish this longing. Rising from his untasted breakfast, he hurriedly swallowed a cup of coffee and took up his hat.