He rode on, and Abel forgot the meeting until, on his way back from the meadow, he ran against Blossom, who was coming rather wildly from the direction in which Jonathan had vanished. "What has upset you so, Blossom? You are like a ghost. Did you meet Mr. Jonathan?" "No, why should I meet Mr. Jonathan? What do you mean?" Without replying she turned from him and ran into the house, while following her more soberly, he asked himself carelessly what could have happened to disturb her. "I wonder if she is frettin' about the rector?" he thought, and his utter inability to understand, or even to recognize the contradictions in the nature of women oppressed his mind. "First, she wanted Mr. Mullen and he didn't want her, then he wanted her and she didn't want him, and now when he's evidently left off caring again, she appears to be grievin' herself sick about him. I wonder if it's always like that--everybody wanting the person that wants somebody else? And yet I know I loved Molly a hundred times more, if that were possible, when I believed she cared for me." He remembered the December afternoon so many years ago, when she had run away from the school in Applegate, and he had found her breasting a heavy snow storm on the road to Jordan's Journey. Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday. Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture. "I thought you had gone," he said, and held out his hand. "Not yet. Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October." In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight. "Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day in June?" she asked suddenly. "I didn't know it, but it was nice of you."