st by the river road."

Master and slave parted, the latter keeping to the sunny thoroughfare,
the former plunging into the narrow, heavily shaded track that ran
through ravine and over ridge, now beside the water and now in close
woods of birch and hemlock. The road was bad, but Selim and his master
bent to it grimly, with no nice avoidance of rut or stone or sunken
place. To the horse there was before him food and rest, to the man his
home. They took at the same pace the much of rough and the little of
smooth, and the miles fell behind them. The sun was high, but there were
threatening masses of clouds, with now and then a distant roll of
thunder. The road was solitary, little used at any time, and to-day as
lonely a woodland way as might well be conceived.

Rand rode with closed lips, and with the mark between his brows. Passion
was having its way with him, such passion as had lived with him, now
drowsing, now fiercely awake, in the days at Richmond between his return
from Williamsburgh and the close of the trial. He saw Roselands and
Jacqueline beneath the beech tree, but he also saw, and that with more
distinctness, the face and form of the man who rode toward Greenwood. He
longed for Jacqueline, but he had not forgiven her. He knew that he
would when he saw her face--would forgive her with a cry for the waste
of the hot, revengeful days, the sleepless nights, since they had
parted. Her face swam before him, between the hemlock boughs, but he was
not ready yet to forgive, not yet, not until he got to Roselands and she
met him with her wistful eyes! He was not a fool; the Absolute within
him knew where lay the need for forgiveness, but it was deeply overlaid
with human pride and wrath. He was at the old, old trick of anger with
another when the fault was all his own. As for Ludwell Cary--

His hand closed with force upon the bridle and his eyes narrowed. "From
the first, from that day upon the Justice's Bench, from that day when we
gathered nuts together, I must have hated. Now it is warp and woof, warp
and woof!" He touched Selim with the spur. "If there were truly a heaven
and truly a hell, and I, in flames myself, saw him in Abraham's bosom,
not to escape from that torment would I call to him, 'Once we were
neighbours, once it seemed that we might have been friends--come down,
come down and help me, Cary!'"

He laughed, a harsh sound that came back from the rock above him. By no
means always, far from even oft