Looking back he saw that the other gig had stopped at the turnpike, and as he hastened toward it with the scarf in his hand, he was rewarded by a flash of bright eyes from the muffled figure at Reuben's side.
"I found this in the road," he said, "you must have dropped it." "Yes, it fell out--thank you," she answered, and it seemed to him that her hand lingered an instant in his before it was withdrawn and buried beneath the rugs.
The pressure remained with him, and a little later as he drove over the frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft clinging touch of her fingers.

Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse.

People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation because he saw them under different conditions from those that hold sway over this planet.

The world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard; and this mixture of rustic ignorance and religious fervor had endowed him with a power of sacrifice in large matters, while it rendered him intolerant of smaller weaknesses.

It was characteristic of the man that he should have arranged for Molly in his thoughts, and at the cost of great suffering to himself, a happiness that was suited to the ideal figure rather than to the living woman.
When he entered the kitchen, after putting the mare into her stall, the familiar room, with its comfortable warmth, dragged him back into a reality in which the dominating spirit was Sarah Revercomb.