Fontenoy. Success begets success; let him make himself a name,
and the gates might open! When he was not in court, or not most
diligently preparing a case, or not instructing Tom Mocket, who was on
the way to become his partner, or not busied with affairs of his patron,
or not keenly observant of the methods of the poor whites whom he hired
to tend his tobacco, he read. He read history: Clarendon, Gibbon, and
Hume; Aristotle, Bacon, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Tom Paine. His Ossian, Caesar, and Plutarch belonged to his
younger days. A translation of the Divina Commedia fell into his hands,
and once he chanced to take up, and then read with the closest
attention, Godwin's Caleb Williams. From Monticello he received the hot
and clamorous journals of the day, Federalist and Republican. He studied
the conditions they portrayed with the intentness of a gladiator
surveying his arena. The Examiner, the Argus, the Aurora, the Gazette
gave, besides the home conflict, the foreign news. He missed no step of
Buonaparte's.

Thrice in these two years he had seen Jacqueline. Once he rode to church
at Saint Anne's that he might see her. She had been at the great race
when Major Churchill's Mustapha won over Nonpareil and Buckeye. The
third time was a month ago in Charlottesville. She was walking, and
Ludwell Cary was with her. When she bowed to Rand, Cary had looked
surprised, but his hat was instantly off. Rand bowed in return, and
passed them, going on to the Court House. He had not seen her again
until four days ago, when he opened his eyes upon her face. The golden
finger on his bed became a shining lance that struck across to the wall.
There were ivy and a climbing rose about the window through which he
looked to the shimmering poplars and the distant hills. Many birds were
singing, and from the direction of the quarters sounded the faint
blowing of a horn. A bee came droning in to the pansies in a bowl.
Rand's dark eyes made a journey through the room, from the flowered
curtains to the mandarin on the screen, from the screen to the willowed
china and the easy chair, from the chair to the picture of General
Washington on the wall, the vases on the mantel-shelf, and the green
hemlock branches masking for the summer the fireplace below. Over all
the blue room and the landscape without was a sense of home, of order
and familiar sweetness. It struck to the soul of a too lonely and too
self-reliant man. Sudden