CHAPTER XI.
A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER When Abel had flung himself over the fence, he snatched the collar from his neck and threw it away from him into the high grass of the meadow.
The act was symbolical not only of his revolt from the power of love, but, in a larger measure, of his rebellion against the tyranny of convention.

Henceforth his Sunday clothes might hang in the closet, for he would never again bend his neck to the starched yoke of custom.
Everything had been for Molly forever.

Her smiles or her frowns, her softness or her cruelty, would make no difference to him in the future--for had not Molly openly implied that she preferred Mr.Mullen?
So this was the end of it all--the end of his ambition, of his struggle to raise himself, of his battle for a little learning that she might not be ashamed.

Lifting his head he could see dimly the one great pine that towered on the hill over its fellows, and he resolved, in the bitterness of his defeat, that he would sell the whole wood to-morrow in Applegate.
He tried to think clearly--to tell himself that he had never believed in her--that he had always known she would throw him over at the last--but the agony in his heart rose in his throat, and he felt that he was stifling in the open air of the pasture.

His nature, large, impulsive, scornful of small complexities, was stripped bare of the veneer of culture by which its simplicity had been overlaid.