"
"I'll cook you one, Jonathan. I can cook beautifully," she said.
The idea amused him. After all they could easily get back to dinner.
"I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, Molly?" he asked,
smiling, and she saw that she had won. Winning was just as easy with
Jonathan as it had been with Reuben or with Abel.
It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian
summer. When they left the train and drove along the corduroy road from
Applegate, the forest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and
copper. Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a
bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky
and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze. The few belated yellow
butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift
pensively in the autumnal stillness.
On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for Gay was occupied with
the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was
thinking that but for Reuben's death, she would never have accepted Mr.
Jonathan's legacy and parted from Abel.
"All this happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk and not across
the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that,
Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have
quarrelled.
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