As he gazed at the pines on the horizon, he
remembered the day he had swung his axe in joy under their branches, and
it seemed to him, while he looked back upon it, that the hour belonged
to the distant memories of his boyhood.
"It's over now, and I'm not going to whine about it," he said aloud to
his hound. "A plain fool is bad enough, Moses, my boy, but a whining
fool is the meanest thing God ever made in man or dog. Because I've lost
the thing I wanted most, I've no mind to wallow in the dust--but, oh,
Molly, Molly!"
She came to him again, not fair and flitting, but ardent and tender,
with her parted red mouth raised to his, and the light and darkness
trembling on her face like faint shadows in the wind. And this vision
of her, which was so vivid that it shook his heart with a pang of agony,
seemed saying to him in words which were not his--which were not words
at all, but some subtler communion of sense--"I am to be loved, but
never possessed, for, like the essence of desire, I elude forever the
conditions of mortality."
A week later, while the thought of her burned like fire in his brain, he
met her face to face in the path which led from the blazed pine over the
pasture to Jordan's Journey.
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