She raised her hand to her eyes and dashed away the bright drops.  “You have done an injustice.  All this time you have thought him what that night you called Aaron Burr.  I know not where Colonel Burr is now, but since the night of the nineteenth of February, he and my husband have had no dealings.”

“My God!” said Cary, in a low voice; then, “This is all your assurance?”

“All?” she echoed proudly.  “It is enough.”

He turned away and, walking to the edge of the wood, stood there, striving for some measure of self-command.  His hands opened and shut.  Lewis Rand was a perjured traitor, and it only remained to tell Jacqueline as much.

The garden swam before his eyes, then the mist passed and he saw with distinctness.  There was a path before him that led away between walls of box to the green and flowery heart of the place, and at the heart was a summer-house.  He saw it all again.  There was the morning in June, there was the blowing rose, there was the sudden vision—­Rand and Jacqueline, hand in hand, with mingled breath!  It was into this path that he had turned—­it was to this wood that he had stumbled, leaving them there.  He felt again the icy shock, the death and wormwood in his soul.  They had had the gold, they had loved and embraced while, with his face to the earth, he had lain there beneath that tree where now she stood.  Well, Time’s globe was turning—­there were shadows now for the lovers’ country!  Their land, too, would have its night; perhaps an endless night.  He entertained the fierce, triumphant thought, but not for long.  He had loved Jacqueline Churchill truly, and her happiness was more to him than his own.  When, presently, he reached the consideration of her in that darkened country, moving forever over ash and cinder beneath an empty, leaden heaven, he found the contemplation intolerable.  A tenderness crept into his heart, divine enough as things go in the heart of man.  The summer-house mocked him still, and the image of Rand walked with armed foot through every chamber of his brain, but he wished no worse for Jacqueline than unending light and love.  After the first red moment, it was not possible to him to put out one lamp, to break one flower, in her paradise.  It hung like a garden in Babylon over the dust and sorrow of the common way, over the gulf of broken gods and rent illusions.  To jar that rainbow tenure by the raising of his voice, to bring that phantom bliss whirling down to the trodden street, lay not within the quality of the man.  He closed his eyes and fought with the memory of that June morning when he and Colonel Churchill had come upon the summer-house; fought with that and with a hundred memories besides, then looked again, and quietly, at the autumn place, bright with late flowers and breathed over by the haunting fragrance of the box.  Another moment and he turned back to the wood and the great tree.