his dressing-gown, and, going to the
fireplace where the logs yet smouldered, threw on light wood and built a
cheerful fire, then took her in his arms and carried her to the great
chair of flowered chintz, set in the light of the dancing flames. "The
wine will warm you. Look, too, what a fire I have made!"

She still shuddered, staring over her shoulder. "Draw the blinds
closer. There's a sound as of some one sighing."

"It is the wind in the beech leaves."

She put an arm across her eyes. "How long is he to lie there, stretched
out upon the wet rocks, beside the stream? Oh, heartless!"

"The storm and darkness have made it long. He will be found this
morning."

"He never was your enemy, Lewis. You thought him that, but he never was,
he never was!"

"I want to tell you," he said, "that all rage is dead. I feel as though
I had left anger far behind, and why there was in my mind so great venom
and rancour I no longer know. Envy and jealousy, too, are gone. They
have been struck out of life, and other things have come to take their
place."

"Ay," she cried, "what other things! O God, O God!"

There was a long silence, while the wind sighed in the beech tree and
the fire muttered on the hearth. Jacqueline sat in the flowered chair,
her raised arms resting upon its back, her head buried in her arms.
Rand, leaning against the mantel, gazed with sombre eyes at her strained
and motionless form. As he stood there, his mind began to move through
the galleries where she was painted. He saw her, a child, beneath the
apple tree, and in her blue gown that day in the Fontenoy garden, and
then again beneath the apple tree, a child no longer, but the woman whom
he loved. He saw her face above him the afternoon they laid him in the
blue room, and he saw her singing to her harp in the Fontenoy
drawing-room,--

"The thirst that from the soul doth rise--"

He saw the next morning--the summer-house, the box, the mockingbird in
the poplar tree, the Seven Sisters rose--and then their marriage eve,
and that fair first summer on the Three-Notched Road, and all the three
years of their wedded life. The picture of her was everywhere, and not
least in the house on Shockoe Hill. He saw her as she had been one snowy
evening in February, and he saw her as she had looked the hour of his
return from Williamsburgh--the pleading, the passion, and the beauty.
And now--now--

The wind sighed again without the windows, and Jacqueline drew a
s