r heart, and waited. As he passed for the third
time the tall harp, he drew his hand heavily across the strings. The
room vibrated to the sound. Rand came back to the hearth, took the
armchair in which Cary had sat, and drew it closer to the glowing
embers. "Come," he said. "Come, Jacqueline, let us look at the pictures
in the fire."

She knelt beside him on the braided rug. "Show me true pictures! Home in
Virginia, and honourable life, and noble service, and my King a King
indeed, and this Colonel Burr gone like a shadow and an ugly
dream!--that is the picture I want to see."

For a moment there was silence before the white ash and the dying heart
of the wood, then Rand with the tongs squared a flaky bed and drew from
top to bottom a jagged line. "This," he said, "is the great artery; this
is the Mississippi River." He drew another line. "Here to the southwest
is Mexico, and that is a country for great dreams. There the plantain
and the orange grow and there are silver and gold--and the warm gulf is
on this side, and the South Sea far, far away, and down here is South
America. The Aztecs lived in Mexico, and Cortez conquered them. He
burned his ships so that he and his Spaniards might not retreat. Here is
the land west of the Mississippi, unknown and far away. There are grassy
plains that seem to roll into the sun, and there are great herds of
game, and warlike Indians, and beyond the range of any vision there are
vast mountains white with snow. Gold, too, may be there. It is a country
enormous, grandiose, rich, and silent,--a desert waiting dumbly for the
strong man's tread." He turned a little and drew another line. "To this
side, away, away to the east, here where you and I are sitting,
watching, watching, here are the Old Thirteen,--the Thirteen that the
English took from the Indians, that the children of the English took
from England. It is the law of us all, Jacqueline, the law of the Three
Kingdoms: the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift. The Old
Thirteen are stable; let them rest! Together they make a great country,
and they will be greater yet But here is the Ohio--la belle Riviere, the
Frenchmen call it. And beyond and below the Ohio, through all the
gigantic valley of a river so great that it seems a fable, south to New
Orleans, and westward to the undiscovered lies the country that is to
be! And Napoleon, in order that he may brandish over England one
thunderbolt the more, sells it for a son