the old blood-stained splendour returned to him. He smelt the
smoke again, he heard the boom of the cannon, the long sobbing rattle of
musketry, and the thought stabbed through him, "God forgive me for
loving a fight!"

Then the fight stopped. There was a patter of feet in the dust as the
young negro fled like a hare up the road in the direction of Dinwiddie.
One of the men leaped the fence and disappeared into the tangled thicket
beyond; while the other two, sobered suddenly, began walking slowly over
the ploughed ground on the right. Ten minutes later Gabriel was lying
alone, with the blood oozing from his mouth, on the trodden weeds by the
roadside. The shadow of the pine had not moved since he watched it; on
the flat rock in front of the cabin the old negress stood, straining her
eyes in the faint sunshine; and up the long road the March wind still
blew, as soft, as provocative, as bud-scented.

BOOK THIRD

THE ADJUSTMENT

CHAPTER I

THE CHANGING ORDER

"So this is life," thought Virginia, while she folded her mourning veil,
and laid it away in the top drawer of her bureau. Like all who are
suddenly brought face to face with tragedy, she felt at the moment that
there was nothing else in existence. All the sweetness of the past had
vanished so utterly that she remembered it only as one remembers a dream
from which one has abruptly awakened. Nothing remained except this
horrible sense of the pitiful insufficiency of life, of the inexorable
finality of death. It was a week since the rector's death, and in that
week she had passed out of her girlhood forever. Of all the things that
she had lived through, this alone had had the power to crush the hope in
her and the odour of crape which floated through the crack of the drawer
sickened her with its reminder of that agonized sense of loss which had
settled over her at the funeral. She was only thirty--the best of her
life should still be in the future--yet as she looked back at her white
face in the mirror it seemed to her that she should never emerge from
the leaden hopelessness which had descended like a weight on her body.
Above the harsh black of her dress, which added ten years to her
appearance, she saw the darkened circles rimming her eyes, the faded
pallor of her skin, the lustreless wave of her hair, which had once had
a satiny sheen on its ripples.

"Grief makes a person look like this," she thought. "I shall never be a
girl again--Oliver