“Gently, gently!” exclaimed the scamp, and started back.  “Lord, how Gideon peeps out of you now and then!”

“You need not say that, either,” retorted Rand grimly.  He stood for a moment, a cloudy presence in the darkening room, then with a short laugh recovered himself.  “I thought the black dog was dead,” he said.  “It’s this gloomy day—­and I did not sleep last night.  Honest!  We’re all indifferent honest!”

“Well, well,” answered the pacific Tom, “I’ll sink or swim with you.  I’ve followed where you have led this many a day.”

Outside the red brick office the snow lay deep.  It was still falling steadily, in large flakes, grey in the upper air, feathery white and pure against the opposite houses and the boles of leafless trees.  The day was closing in.  Up and down the street merchants were putting up their shutters; customers had been few on such a snowy day.  Here and there appeared a figure, booted and greatcoated, emerging from a tavern or from a law office such as Rand’s.  A sledge passed, laden with pine and hickory, drawn by mules with jangling bells; and a handful of boys loosed from school threw down their bags of books and fell to snowballing.  A negro shuffled by with a spade on his shoulder, singing as he went,—­

“Didn’t my Lawd deliber Daniel,
Didn’t my Lawd deliber Daniel,
An’ why not ebery man? 
He delibered Daniel from de lions’ den,
An’ de Hebrew Chillern from de furnace,
He delibered David from de han’ of Saul,
An’ why not ebery man?”

Rand turned into Governor Street, climbed its white ascent, and struck across the Capitol Square.  Above him every bough had its weight of snow, and seen through the drifting veil the pillared Capitol looked remote as that building of which it was a copy.  He walked quickly, with a light and determined step, a handsome figure in a many-caped coat of bottle green, striding through the snow toward the cheer of home.  In his outer man, at least, the eighteen months since his marriage had wrought a change.  What was striking then was more striking now,—­his ease and might of frame, the admirable poise of his head, and the force expressed in every feature, the air of power that was about him like an emanation.  The difference was that what had been rude strength was now strength polished and restrained.  The deeps might hide abrupt and violent things, but the surface had assumed a fine amenity.  Where he wished to learn he was the aptest pupil, and from the days of the tobacco-field he had longed for this smooth lustre.  Not Gideon, but the mother, spoke in the appreciation and the facility.  Manner counted for much in Lewis Rand’s day; the critical point was not what you did, but the way you did it.  Rand set himself to learn from his wife all the passwords of the region native to her, but into which he had broken.  She taught him that code with a courtesy and simplicity exquisitely high-minded and sweet, and he learned with quickness,