His old friend looked at him a little wonderingly. "Do the simple right,
my dear, whatever it is that you see before you."

"The simple right! And to rejoice the heart of my Maker--if I have one?"

"Do the right strongly and surely, Lewis."

"Whatever it is?"

"Whatever it is." Mrs. Jane Selden looked at him thoughtfully, her hands
clasped upon her key-basket. "I'm only an old woman--just a
camp-follower with an interest in the battle. I wish that you had had a
friend of your own age--a man, and your equal in power and grasp.
Gaudylock and Mocket and such--they're well enough, but you're high
above them, you're a sort of Emperor to them. Could you but have had
such a friend, Lewis--a man like the Carys--"

"For God's sake, don't!" cried Rand hoarsely. He poured out a glass of
wine, looked at it, and pushed it away. "I will go now, for there is
work waiting for me in town, and at home Do as I tell you about Carfax.
Good-bye, good-bye!"

Out upon the road, passing through a strip of pine and withered scrub,
he raised his hand, and for some moments covered his eyes. When he
dropped it, he saw, in the strong purples of the winter evening, again
that misty figure, riding this time, riding near him, not in the road,
but apparent in the air against and between the tall trunks of pines.
"Cary," he said again, "Cary!"

There was no response from the figure in the air. "Cary," cried Rand, "I
would we had been friends!"

Selim reached the open country; the pines fell away, the form was gone.
Rand touched his horse with the spur and rode fast between brown
stubble-fields darkening to the hills and to the evening sky. "Friends,"
he repeated, "friends! That would be on terms of my doing the simple
right--the simple right after the most complicated wrong! Terms! there
are no terms."

Leaving the fields, he rode down to a stream, crossed it, and saw the
shape against a pale space of evening sky. "Is it to be always thus?" he
thought. "I would that I had never been born."

CHAPTER XXXVI

IN PURSUIT

January passed and February passed. Fairfax Cary, riding for the third
time since the New Year from Malplaquet toward Greenwood, marked the
blue March sky, the pale brown catkins by the brooks, and the white
flowers of the bloodroot piercing the far-spread carpet of dead leaves.
He rode rapidly, but he paused at Forrest's forge and at the mill below
the ford. This also he had done before. Neither the smith nor the men