ad seen the garden with
his bodily eyes, for there was the morning he had spent at Fontenoy. In
the desert of his hardly-treated, eager, and longing youth the place and
the life of which the girl who came to Mrs. Selden's had told him was
become the vision of an oasis and a paradise. The magic word was
Fontenoy. If Gideon Rand or Adam Gaudylock chanced to pronounce it, it
was as though the Captain of the Thieves had said, "Open Sesame!" The
cave door opened, and he saw strange riches.

That day at Fontenoy! He tried to recall it, but it did not stand out in
his memory; it was curiously without edge. Trying to remember was like
remembering a dream, delicious and evasive. The child named Jacqueline
had changed to a girl named Jacqueline. She had spoken to him shyly, and
he had answered with much greater shyness, with a reddening cheek and a
stumbling tongue. He remembered her dress, a soft blue stuff that he was
afraid of touching, and he remembered how burning was his consciousness
of his coarse shoes, his shirt of osnaburg, the disreputable hat upon
his sunburnt hair. Then they had walked in the garden, and sat on the
steps of a summer house, and he had been very happy after all. And then
a black boy had come to tell him that the Colonel was ready with the
receipt he was to carry back to the Three-Notched Road. He said good-bye
with great awkwardness, and went away, and he saw the girl no more for a
long, long time, for so long a time that insensibly her image faded. It
was in the October of that year that he went to Richmond with Gideon,
and met Mr. Jefferson in the bookshop by the bridge.

The years that followed that meeting! Rand, lying still upon his
pillows, with his eyes upon the yellow mandarin, passed them in
review,--well, they had not been wasted! Usually he saw the approximate
truth about himself, and he knew that these years of toil and
achievement were honourable to him. He thought of all those years, and
then he turned his head upon the pillow and faced through widely opened
windows the misty, fragrant morning. His mind turned with suddenness to
a morning two summers past. His father, who had lived to take grim pride
in the son he had been used to thwart, was six months dead, and he
himself was living alone, as he yet lived alone, in the small house upon
the Three-Notched Road. He lived there with his ambitions, which were
many. That morning he had gone, without knowing why, down through the
tobacco-fiel