past my finding out," said Edward. "Let it rest
for a while, Dick." He rose from his chair stiffly, like an old man.
"Let Cary go home to-morrow as he intends. 'Absence makes the heart grow
fonder,' they say. She may find that she misses him, and may look for
him when he comes riding over. Never fear but he'll ride over often! He
mustn't guess, of course, that you have spoken to her. And that's all we
can do, Dick, except--" Major Edward walked stiffly across the floor and
paused before the portrait of his brother Henry, dead and gone these
many years. The face looked imperiously down upon him. Henry had stood
for something before he died,--for grace and manly beauty, pride and
fire. The Major's eyes suddenly smarted. "Poor white trash," he said
between his teeth, "and Henry's daughter!" He turned and came back to
the table. "Dick! just as soon as you can, you clear the house of old
Gideon Rand's son!"

"What's he got to do with it?" asked Colonel Dick.

"I don't know," said the other. "But I want him out of the blue room,
and out of Fontenoy! and now, Dick, I've got a piece to write this
morning on the designs of Aaron Burr."

At five in the afternoon Cary returned, quiet and handsome, ready with
his account of matters at Greenwood, from the stable, upon which Major
Churchill must pronounce, to the drawing-room paper, which awaited Miss
Dandridge's sentence. His behaviour was perfection, but "He's hard hit,"
said his brother to himself. "What, pray, would Miss Churchill have?"
And Unity, "The shepherds and shepherdesses don't match. How can she
have the heart?" And Major Churchill, "Are women blind? This is Hyperion
to a satyr." And Jacqueline, "Oh, miserable me! Is he writing or
reading, or is he lying thinking, there in the blue room?"

CHAPTER X

TO ALTHEA

Adam Gaudylock came, when his leisure served him, to Fontenoy as he went
everywhere, by virtue of his quality of free lance and golden-tongued
narrator of western news. The stress of thought at the moment was to the
West and the empire that had been purchased there; and a man from beyond
Kentucky, with tales to tell of the Mississippi Territory, brought his
own welcome to town, tavern, and plantation. If this were true of all,
it was trebly true of Adam, who had been born open-eyed. As the magnet
draws the filings, so he drew all manner of tidings. News came to him as
by a thousand carrier pigeons. He took toll of the solitary in the brown
and pat