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"Yes, I left him in the Haunt's Walk." "He has not seemed well of late," said Mrs. Gay softly, "I am trying to persuade him to leave us and go back to Europe." "He is anxious about your health and doesn't like to go so far away from you," replied Molly, sitting on an ottoman beside her chair. Taking her hand, Mrs. Gay caressed it while she answered.
But it was impossible to present a woman's soul to him as a concrete image. "I don't want to live with him I don't want anything from him," responded Blossom, with pride. "I don't want anything from him ever again," she repeated, and putting Molly's arms away from her, she turned and moved slowly down the Haunt's Walk toward the Poplar Spring.
She had passed under the trees at the Poplar Spring, and was deep in the witch-hazel boughs which made a screen for the Haunt's Walk, when beyond a sudden twist in the path, she saw ahead of her the figures of Blossom Revercomb and Jonathan Gay. At first they showed merely in dim outlines standing a little apart, with the sunlit branch of a sweet gum tree dropping between them.
The world appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy places of the Haunt's Walk.
"En I'se got a sack er co'n I'd be moughty bleeged ter git ground up fur hominy meal " With a laugh Abel passed on through the side-garden, and entered the leafless shrubbery that bordered the Haunt's Walk. The old negro had disturbed his dream, which had been of Molly in her red stockings, with the red ribbon binding her curls.
"All this happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk and not across the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that, Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have quarrelled." It was such a little thing only the eighth of a mile which had decided her future. She might just as easily have turned aside if she had only suspected.
So closely had it followed the changing seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed in the Haunt's Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn.
He fell back as Gay nodded pleasantly, and the wheels grated over the rocky ground by the well. With a slow flick on the long whip, the carriage crossed the three roads and rolled rapidly into the turnpike. And while she gazed straight ahead into the flat distance, Molly was thinking, "All this has happened because I went down the Haunt's Walk that April afternoon and not over the east meadow."
"It's a gloomy old business, isn't it?" he observed, glancing from the high canopied bed with its hangings of faded damask to an engraving of the Marriage of Pocahontas between the dormer-windows. "If there are ghosts about, I suppose I'd better prepare to face them." "Only in the west wing, the darkies say, but I think they are bats. As for those in the haunt's walk, I never believed in them.
I hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect of a weakness in Leigh Haunt's character, that I should be sensible of a regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I sincerely believe that he has found an infinity of better things in the world whither he has gone.
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