he guns of the prosecution. Jacqueline listened, fascinated
for a time, but the words at last grew to hurt her so that, could she
have done so unobserved, she would have stopped her ears with her hands.
The feverish interest of the scene still held her in its grasp, but the
words were cruel and struck upon her heart. She could not free herself
from the brooding thought of how poignant, how burning, how deadly
poisonous they had been to her, had all things been different and she
forced to sit in this place hearing them launched against another than
Aaron Burr, there, there at that bar! She unlocked her hands, drew a
long and tremulous breath, and, leaning a little forward, tried not to
listen, and to lose herself in watching the throng below. Her eyes fell,
at once, upon Ludwell Cary.

He was standing where she had before marked him, beside a window almost
opposite, his arm upon the sill, his attention closely given to the
District Attorney, who was now eulogising that great patriot, General
James Wilkinson. Now, while Jacqueline looked, he turned his head. It
was as though she had called and he had been ready with his answer.

Painfully raised in feeling and driven out of habitual citadels, tense
and fevered, subtly touched by the storm in the air, she found in the
moment no sense of self-consciousness, no question and no movement of
aversion. She and Cary looked at each other long and fully, and with
something of an old understanding; on her part a softening of pardon for
the quarrel and the duel, on his a light and compassion that she could
not clearly understand. She knew that he read her thoughts, but if he,
too, was remembering that evening long ago in February, he must also
remember that Lewis Rand gave up, that snowy night, definitely and
forever, the fevered ambitions, the too-high imaginings, the conqueror's
thirst for power; gave them up, and turned from the charmer into the
path of right! There came into her heart a longing that Ludwell Cary
should see the matter truly. He should have done so that afternoon in
the cedar wood; where was the black mote that kept the vision out? She
was suddenly aware--and it came to her with a dizzying strangeness--that
there was in her own soul that reference of matters to the bar of Cary's
idea, thought, and judgment which, that day in the cedar wood, she had
told him existed in that of her husband. Were she and Lewis grown so
much alike? or had her own soul always recognised