If he did not take trouble to wonder at her confession, or to modestly ask himself how he had deserved her love, neither did he insult her with pity or with any lightness of thought.  Nor was he ready to believe that his rejection was final.  Apparently indifferent as he was, it was yet his way to move steadily and relentlessly, if very quietly, toward what goal he desired to reach.  He thought that Fair View might yet call Evelyn Byrd its mistress.

Since turning into the crossroad that, running south and east, would take him back to the banks of the James and to his own house, he had not slackened speed, but now, as he saw through the trees before him a long zigzag of rail fence, he drew rein.  The road turned, and a gate barred his way.  When he had opened it and passed through, he was upon his own land.

He had ridden off his irritation, and could now calmly tell himself that the blunder was made and over with, and that it was the duty of the philosopher to remember it only in so far as it must shape his future course.  His house of cards had toppled over; but the profound indifferentism of his nature enabled him to view the ruins with composure.  After a while he would build the house again.  The image of Evelyn, as she had stood, dark-eyed and pale, with the flowers pressed to her bosom, he put from him.  He knew her strength of soul; and with the curious hardness of the strong toward the strong, and also not without the delicacy which, upon occasion, he could both feel and exhibit, he shut the door upon that hour in the forest.

He had left the woods, and was now riding through a field of newly planted tobacco.  It and the tobacco house in the midst of it were silent, deserted, bathed in the late sunshine.  The ground rose slightly, and when he had mounted with it he saw below him the huddle of cabins which formed the ridge quarter, and winding down to it a string of negroes.  One turned his head, and saw the solitary horseman upon the summit of the slope behind him; another looked, and another, until each man in line had his head over his shoulder.  They knew that the horseman was their master.  Some had been upon the plantation when he was a boy; others were more recent acquisitions who knew not his face; but alike they grinned and ducked.  The white man walking beside the line took off his hat and pulled a forelock.  Haward raised his hand that they might know he saw, and rode on.

Another piece of woods where a great number of felled trees cumbered the ground, more tobacco, and then, in worn fields where the tobacco had been, knee-deep wheat rippling in the evening breeze.  The wheat ran down to a marsh, and to a wide, slow creek that, save in the shadow of its reedy banks, was blue as the sky above.  Haward, riding slowly beside his green fields and still waters, noted with quiet, half-regretful pleasure this or that remembered feature of the landscape.  There had been little change.  Here, where he remembered deep woods, tobacco was planted; there, where the tobacco had been, were now fields of wheat or corn, or wild tangles of vine-rid saplings and brushwood:  but for this it might have been yesterday that he had last ridden that way.