"Don't I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!" "While they last--but they don't last, you know, they have their seasons. That's the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn't it?" But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes. "All the same I want to go," she repeated obstinately. Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache. "Molly," he asked, "have you been thinking again about the miller?" "How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly. The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry! "Well, I'm glad you haven't--because, you know, really it wouldn't do," he answered. "What wouldn't do?" "Your marrying a Revercomb--it wouldn't do in the least." "Why wouldn't it?" "You can see that for yourself, can't you? You've come entirely out of that life and you couldn't go back to it." "I don't see why I couldn't if I wanted to?" she threw out at him with sudden violence. Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn't agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands! "Well, in the first place, I don't believe you'd ever want to," he said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you'd regret it in ten minutes." "If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it," was her amazing rejoinder. Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge. "You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd be sorry before you got up to the altar." "I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it." "You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?" "I like raising chickens." "And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?" "I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the same everywhere." "The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any difference?"