bark
or something. I couldn't carry on business without you, you know."

Rand looked at him with dark and sombre eyes. "Couldn't you, poor old
Tom? Well, we'll keep it on awhile together. I don't want the doctor.
Once, long ago, I might have doctored myself." He laughed. "Now there's
no bark in Peru--no balm in Gilead. Well, what we cannot have, we must
do without! Look out, will you, and see if Young Isham is there with
Selim?"

The Three-Notched Road stretched red and stark between rusty cedars and
gaunt trunks of locust trees. It was cold, and overhead the sun was
fighting with the clouds. Rand went rapidly, his powerful horse taking
the road with a long and easy stride. Few were abroad; the bare and
frozen fields stretched on either hand to the hills, the hills rose to
the mountains, grey and sullen in the changing light. That meadow,
field, and hill had once been mantled with tender verdure, and would be
so again, was hard to believe, the land lay so naked and so grim.

Mrs. Selden's small, red brick mansion appeared among the leafless
trees. Rand checked Selim slightly, gazing at the place with the weary
uncertainty he had before exhibited, then turned for the moment from the
task, irksome now as were all tasks, and rode on past Mrs. Jane Selden's
to the house in which he had lived with his father and mother, and had
lived with Jacqueline.

The place had been rented out since that summer of 1804, but the tenant,
failing to make good, was gone, and for some months the house had been
vacant. Rand and Selim moved slowly along the old, old familiar way.
Every stick, every stone, every fence-corner was known to both. The man
let his hand fall upon the brute's neck. "We're going home, Selim," he
said. "We're going home."

It was not now the small, clean place, fresh with whitewash and bright
with garden flowers, shone upon by the sun and sung about by birds, to
which he had brought Jacqueline. The tenant had been dull, and the
place was fallen into disrepair. In the winter air and without a leaf or
flower, it looked again as it had looked when he and Gideon lived there
alone. He dismounted, fastened Selim to the fence, and entered by the
gate beneath the mimosa tree.

That the mimosa had ever shown sensitive leaf and mist of rosy bloom
ranked now among other impossibilities. He stood for a moment looking at
it in silence, then walked up the narrow path, mounted the porch steps,
and tried the door. It was locked,