“None that I could advance—­none.  I have an inward certainty, that is all.  Nor can I—­nor can I, Fair, even speak of such a suspicion.  You see that?”

“Yes, I see that.”

“I repented last winter of having written that letter signed ‘Aurelius.’  I knew nothing, and it seemed beneath me to have made that guesswork public.  That he was my enemy should have made me careful, but I was under strong feeling, and I wrote.  He has neither forgotten nor forgiven.  Denounce him now as a conspirator against his party and his country?  That is impossible.  Impossible from lack of proof, and impossible to me were proofs as thick as blackberries!  But if I can help it, he shall not leave Virginia.”

“Is it your opinion that he would take her with him?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Would she go?”

Cary rose, moved to the window, and stood there a moment in silence.  When, presently, he came back to the table, his face was pale, but lifted, controlled, and quiet.  There was a saying in the county,—­“The high look of the Carys.”  He wore it now, the high look of the Carys.  “Yes, Fair, she would go with him.”

There was a silence, then the younger spoke.  “She is at Fontenoy.  Mrs. Churchill may linger long, and her niece is always with her.  Rand could not take his wife away.”

“It’s a check to his plans, no doubt,” said the other wearily.

“He’s frowning over it now.  He’ll wait as long as may be.  He would sin, but he would not sin meanly.  In his conception of himself a greatness, even in transgression, must clothe all that he does.  He’ll wait, gravely and decently, even though to wait is his heavy risk.”  He made a gesture with his hand.  “Do I not know him, know him well?  Sometimes I think that for three years I’ve had no other study!”

“You should have let me challenge him that first election day,” said Fairfax Cary gloomily.  “If we had met and I had put a bullet through him, then all this coil would have been spared.  What do you propose to do now?”

“At the moment I am going to Fontenoy.”

“I would speak, I think, to Major Edward.”

“Yes:  that was in my mind.  If there is any right, it lies with the men of her family.  Fair, on the nineteenth of February I was at Lewis Rand’s!”

“Ah!” exclaimed his brother.

“I was admitted, as I have since come to see, by mistake, and against orders.  I found her alone in her drawing-room, and we sat by the dying fire and we talked of this very thing, this very plot, this very Aaron Burr—­yes, and of the part a stronger than Burr might play in the West and in Mexico!  She told me that her husband was busy that night—­excused him because he was engaged with a client from the country.  A client from the country! and I, who would have taken her word against an angel’s, I sat there and wondered why she was distrait and pale!  She was pale because there was danger, she was absent because she was contriving how she might soonest rid the house of one who was not wanted there that night!  She was dressed in gauze and gems; she had supped with Aaron Burr—­”