ubscribers to
the Aurora.

All this was somewhat later, when the stage-coach and the mail-rider had
distributed the slow-travelling news. In the mean time Lewis Rand lay in
the curtained bed in the blue room at Fontenoy, and wondered at that
subtle force called Chance. The blue roses upon the hangings, the blue
willows and impossible bridges of the china, the apple-cheeked moon
surmounting the face of the loud-ticking clock were not more
fantastically unnatural than that he, Lewis Rand, should be lying there
between the linen sheets, in the sunny morning stillness of the fourth
day after his fall, listening for the stir of the awakening house, for
one step upon the stair, and for one voice. He was where he had desired
to be; he was at Fontenoy; but the strangeness of his being there
weighed upon him. He would hear the step and the voice; chance had
brought him past every ward of a hostile house, and had laid him there
in the blue room to be generously pitied and lavishly cared for; chance
had given him leverage. To each the chaos of his own nature; if, with
Rand, the Spirit brooded none too closely over the face of the deep, yet
was there light enough to tread by. As he lay in the blue room, watching
the early sunlight steal through the window and lay a golden finger on
his bed, he had no sense of triumph, no smugness of satisfaction over
the attainment of his dream. He thought of how often as a boy, working
under the glare of the sun, in the shadeless tobacco-fields, he had
dreamed of the poplars of Fontenoy, the cool porches, the cool rooms,
the rest from labour, and the books, of all that the little girl named
Jacqueline had told him, sitting under the apple tree beside the stream
that flowed between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road.
As a boy, he would have been puzzled to choose between "Will you go to
Heaven?" and "Will you go to Fontenoy?" The one seemed as remote, as
unattainable, and as happy as the other. The advantage was possibly with
Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself. He could not have
described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew
every room at Fontenoy. Before he was laid in it, he had known the blue
room, the roses on the curtains, and the peacock-feathered mandarin
forever climbing a dull yellow screen. The library should be below, with
the bookshelves, and the glass door opening on the snowball bushes.
Outside his window was the flower garden. He h