"Good God, man! Don't you know she's making a laughin' stock of you?"
"That's a lie!" Abel had replied curtly, and Solomon, with the craven
spirit of all natural despots, had muttered beneath his breath that he
"reckoned, after all, it must have been a sudden attack of sickness."
Of the attack and its nature Abel had said no word after this even to
Judy. During that embarrassed walk out of the church, while she clung
sobbing hysterically to his arm, he had resolved once for all that,
even though her behaviour cost him his ambition, he would never stoop to
reproach her. What right, indeed, had he to reproach her when he loved
Molly quite as madly, if not so openly, as she loved the rector? It was
as if he looked on Judy's suffering through his own, and was therefore
endowed with a quality of understanding which his ordinary perceptions
would never have given him.
When he came in sight of the mill, the flash of red wheels caught his
eyes, and he distinguished Mr. Mullen's gig in the road in front of the
door. Having seen Judy as he rode by on his round of visits, the rector
had stopped for a moment to inquire if she had entirely recovered her
health.
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