d for this smooth lustre. Not Gideon, but the mother, spoke in the
appreciation and the facility. Manner counted for much in Lewis Rand's
day; the critical point was not what you did, but the way you did it.
Rand set himself to learn from his wife all the passwords of the region
native to her, but into which he had broken. She taught him that code
with a courtesy and simplicity exquisitely high-minded and sweet, and
he learned with quickness, gratitude, and lack of any false shame. What
else he might have learned of her he dimly felt, but he had not
covenanted with existence for qualities that would war with a hundred
purposes of his brain and will. He and Jacqueline were lovers yet. At
the sight of each other the delicate fire ran through their veins; in
absence the mind felt along the wall and dreamed of the gardens within.
If the woman who had given all was the more constant lover; if the man,
while his passion sweetened all his life, yet bowed before his great
idol and fought and slaved for Power, it was according to the nature of
the two, and there was perhaps no help.

He left the Capitol Square and went on toward the house he had retaken
for the second winter in Richmond. Few were afoot, though now and then a
sleigh went by. Rand's mind as he walked was busy, not with the debate
of to-morrow or the visitor of to-night, the Mathews trial or Tom
Mocket's puerile schemes, but with the letter in the Gazette signed
"Aurelius." It had been an attack, able beyond the common, certainly not
upon Lewis Rand, but upon the party which, in the eyes of the
generality, he yet most markedly represented. In the inflamed condition
of public sentiment such attacks were of weekly occurrence; the wise man
was he who put them by unmoved. For the most part Rand was wise. Federal
diatribes upon the Tripoli war, the Florida purchase, the quarrel with
Spain, Santo Domingo, Neutral Trade, and Jefferson's leanings toward
France left him cold. This letter in the Gazette had not done so. It had
gone to the sources of things, analyzing with a coolness and naming with
a propriety the more remarkable that it acknowledged, on certain sides,
a community of thought with the party attacked. The result was that, as
in civil war, the quarrel, through understanding, was the more
determined. The man who signed "Aurelius" had not spared to point out,
with a certain melancholy sternness, the plague spots, the defenceless
places. Moreover, throughout his ex