The coach and four lumbered on down the dusty Main Street.  Mrs. Selden, sitting opposite her brown paper bundles, waved her fan and looked out on the parching trees and the straggling, vine-embowered houses.  For half an hour there had been a thought at the back of her head, and now it suddenly opened wings.  Those strangely arranged lines of figures on that paper which had fluttered to the floor, they formed no sum that Lewis Rand was working!  The paper that they covered was not a stray leaf; it had been folded like a letter.  There was, she remembered, a piece of wax upon it.  It was a day when men of mark often wrote to each other in cipher—­there was nothing strange in Lewis Rand so corresponding with whom he chose.  Most probably it was a letter from the President—­though that could hardly be, seeing that the President was at Monticello!  Mrs. Selden looked out of the window towards that low, green mountain which was now rising before her, and frowningly tried to remember some gossamer of speech which had been blown to her upon the Three-Notched Road.  A quarrel between Rand and the President?—­pshaw! it could hardly have been that!  She had a sudden memory of Rand’s face ere he grew to manhood, of the ardent eyes and the involuntary gesture of reverence which he used when he spoke of Mr. Jefferson.  He could not even speak of him without a certain trembling of the voice.  Any one could see the change in him since then, but it was hardly to be believed that the old feeling did not abide at the bottom of the well!  Mrs. Selden was annoyed.  The letter might have been from Mr. Madison, or Mr. Monroe, or Albert Gallatin, or John Randolph,—­though John Randolph, too, had quarrelled with the President,—­or Spencer Roane, or almost any great Democrat-Republican.  It was no business of hers whom it was from.  A colour crept into her withered cheek, and she tapped her black silk shoe upon the floor of the coach.  “Yes; a giant of a sum,” Lewis had said with great easiness, and then had put the paper out of sight.  Why had he not been frank?  He might have said to an old friend, “That’s a cipher,—­you see men will be riddlers still!” and then have laid away the letter as securely as he pleased!  Mrs. Selden hated deceit in anything, great or small, and hated to find flaws in folk of whom she was fond.  It was a trifle truly, but Lewis Rand had meant to give her a false impression, and that when he knew as well as she how she detested falsity!  As for his reasons for concealment,—­let him keep his reasons!  She angrily told herself that Jane Selden had no desire to pry into a politician’s secrets.  But he should have said that the letter was a letter!  With which conclusion, the coach having drawn up before Vinie Mocket’s door, Mrs. Selden dismissed the matter from her mind, and, descending, was met by Vinie herself at the gate.

“I’ve got the sweetmeats all cut, Mrs. Selden!  Grapes and baskets, and hearts with arrows through them, and vases of roses.  I never did any prettier.  Won’t you come in, ma’am?  There’s water just drawn from the well.”