He spoke with conviction, but now, as though to lighten his own mood, he laughed.  “All this may not be so,” he said.  “It may be but a dream of our over-peaceful night.”

Jacqueline rose, motioned him with a smile to keep his seat, and, moving to an escritoire standing near the door, wrote a line upon a sheet of paper, then rang the bell and when Joab appeared, put the paper into his hand.  “Give this to your master,” she said, and came back to Cary beside the fire.  She smiled, but he saw with concern that she was very pale, and that the amethysts were trembling at her throat.  “I should not have read you this letter,” he exclaimed.  “It is over-caustic, over-bitter.  Do not let it trouble you.  You have grown pale!”

She bent over the fire as if she were cold.  “It is nothing.  Yes, I was troubled—­I am always troubled when I think of Fontenoy.  But it is over now—­and indeed I wanted to hear Uncle Edward’s letter.”  She straightened herself and turned to him a smiling face.  “And now tell me of yourself!  You are looking worn.  Men work too hard in Richmond.  Oh, for the Albemarle air!  The snow will be white to-morrow on my fir tree, and Deb will have to throw crumbs for the birds.  I have learned a new song.  When next you come, I will sing it to you.”

“Will you not,” asked Cary,—­“will you not sing it to me now?”

She shook her head.  “Not now.  How the branches strike against the roof to-night!”

As she spoke she moved restlessly, and Cary saw the amethysts stir again.  A thought flashed through his mind.  It had to do with Lewis Rand, of whom he often thought, sometimes with melancholy envy, sometimes with strong dislike, sometimes with unwilling admiration, and always with painful curiosity.  Now, the substance of Major Churchill’s letter strongly in mind, with senses rendered more acute and emotions heightened as they always were in the presence of the woman he had not ceased to love, troubled, too, by something in her demeanor, intangibly different from her usual frank welcome, he suddenly and vividly recalled a much-applauded speech that Rand had made three days before in a public gathering.  It had included a noteworthy display of minute information of western conditions, extending to the physical features of the country and to every degree of its complex population.  One sentence among many had caught Cary’s attention, had perplexed him, and had remained in his memory to be considered afterwards, closely and thoughtfully.  There was one possible meaning—­

Cary crumpled the letter in his hand.  Rand’s speech perplexed him no longer.  That was it—­that was it!  His breath came quickly.  He had builded better—­he had builded better than he knew, when he wrote that paper signed “Aurelius”!

With fingers that were not quite steady he smoothed and refolded Major Churchill’s letter He was saying to himself, “What does she know She grew pale Thou suspicious fool!  That was for thought of home He will have told her nothing—­nothing!  Her soul is clear.”