"What I can't understand is why the people about here--those I met at Bottom's Ordinary, for instance, seem to have disliked me even before I came." Without surprise or embarrassment, she changed the basket from her right to her left arm, and this simple movement had the effect of placing him at a distance, though apparently by accident.
"That's because of the old gentleman, I reckon," she answered, "my folks all hated him, I don't know why." "But can you guess?
You see I really want to understand.

I've been away since I was eight years old and I have only the haziest memories." The question brought them into a sudden intimacy, as if his impulsive appeal to her had established a relation which had not existed the minute before.

He liked the look of her strong shoulders, of her deep bosom rising in creamy white to her throat; and the quiver of her red lower lip when she talked, aroused in him a swift and facile emotion.
The melancholy of the landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by the wind.
Around them the red-topped orchard grass faded to pale rose in the twilight, and beyond the crumbling rail fence miles of feathery broomsedge swept to the pines that stood straight and black against the western horizon.

Impressions of the hour and the scene, of colour and sound, were blended in the allurement which Nature proffered him, for her own ends, through the woman beside him.

Not Blossom Revercomb, but the great Mother beguiled him.