"Well, it's a primitive folk, isn't it ?" he said, "and gets on my nerves after a while." Through the afternoon he was restless and out of humour, tormented less by the memory of Blossom's face than by the little brown mole on her cheek.

He resolved a dozen times a day that he would not see her, and in the very act of resolving, he would begin to devise means of waylaying her as she went down to the store or passed to and from the pasture.

A certain sex hatred, which is closely allied to the mere physical fact of love, asserted itself at times, and he raged hotly against her coldness, her indifference, against the very remoteness that attracted him.

Then he would soften to her, and with the softening there came always the longing not only to see, but to touch her--to breathe her breath, to lay his hand on her throat.
The next day he went to the willow copse, but she did not come.

On the one following, he took down his gun and started out to shoot partridges, but when the hour of the meeting came, he found himself wandering over the fields near the Revercombs' pasture with his eye on the little path down which she had come that rimy October morning.