rose, there was the sudden vision--Rand and Jacqueline,
hand in hand, with mingled breath! It was into this path that he had
turned--it was to this wood that he had stumbled, leaving them there. He
felt again the icy shock, the death and wormwood in his soul. They had
had the gold, they had loved and embraced while, with his face to the
earth, he had lain there beneath that tree where now she stood. Well,
Time's globe was turning--there were shadows now for the lovers'
country! Their land, too, would have its night; perhaps an endless
night. He entertained the fierce, triumphant thought, but not for long.
He had loved Jacqueline Churchill truly, and her happiness was more to
him than his own. When, presently, he reached the consideration of her
in that darkened country, moving forever over ash and cinder beneath an
empty, leaden heaven, he found the contemplation intolerable. A
tenderness crept into his heart, divine enough as things go in the heart
of man. The summer-house mocked him still, and the image of Rand walked
with armed foot through every chamber of his brain, but he wished no
worse for Jacqueline than unending light and love. After the first red
moment, it was not possible to him to put out one lamp, to break one
flower, in her paradise. It hung like a garden in Babylon over the dust
and sorrow of the common way, over the gulf of broken gods and rent
illusions. To jar that rainbow tenure by the raising of his voice, to
bring that phantom bliss whirling down to the trodden street, lay not
within the quality of the man. He closed his eyes and fought with the
memory of that June morning when he and Colonel Churchill had come upon
the summer-house; fought with that and with a hundred memories besides,
then looked again, and quietly, at the autumn place, bright with late
flowers and breathed over by the haunting fragrance of the box. Another
moment and he turned back to the wood and the great tree.

Jacqueline sat beneath the cedar, the branch of ironweed again within
her hand. She had found it natural that Ludwell Cary should turn away.
It was not easy to struggle against a misconception, to re-marshal facts
and revise judgments--often it was hard. She waited quietly, fingering
the tufts of purple bloom, her eyes upon the clear sky between the cedar
boughs. When at last she heard his step and looked up, it was with an
exquisite kindness in her large, dark eyes. "It was a natural mistake,"
she said. "Do not think