are out in
the quarter. Do you hear the stream--our stream--hurrying past the apple
tree? It is hurrying to the sea--the great sea. We've put out to sea
together--you and I, just you and I!"

"Just you and I!" she echoed. "Oh, bliss to be together!"

"Let us go," he whispered. "Let us go back to the house," and with his
arm around her, they moved up the path between the flowers that had
closed with the night.

CHAPTER XIII

THE THREE-NOTCHED ROAD

Lewis Rand and his wife dwelt that summer and autumn in the house on the
Three-Notched Road, and were happy there. If the ghost of Gideon Rand
walked, the place, renovated, clean, bright, and homely sweet, showed no
consciousness of any influence of the dark. Passers-by on the dusty road
looked curiously at the gay little yard and the feathery mimosa and the
house behind the pines. "Lewis Rand lives there," they said, and made
their horses go more slowly.

The pines hid the porch where Jacqueline sat with her work, or, hands
about her knees, dreamed the hours away. She was much alone, for after
the first week Rand rode daily to his office in Charlottesville. There
was no reconciliation with her people. All her things had been sent from
Fontenoy. Linen that had been her mother's lay with bags of lavender in
an old carved chest from Santo Domingo, and pieces of slender, inlaid
furniture stood here and there in the room they called the parlour. Her
candlesticks were upon the mantel, and her harp made the room's chief
ornament. Her fortune, which was fair, had been formally made over to
her and to Rand. She was glad it was no less; had it been vastly
greater, she would only have thought, "This will aid him the more." The
little place was very clean, very sweet, ordered, quiet, and lovable.
She was a trained housewife as well as the princess of his story, and
she made the man she loved believe in Paradise. Each afternoon when he
left the jargon and wrangling of the courtroom his mind turned at once
to his home and its genius. All the way through the town, beckoning him
past the Eagle and past every other house or office which had for him an
open door, he saw Jacqueline waiting beneath the mimosa at the gate,
clad in white, her dark hair piled high, about her throat a string of
coral or of amber. Out on the road, beneath the forest trees, in the
radiance of the evening, he rode with his head high and a smile within
his eyes. All the scheming, all the labour and strife