Jacqueline sat beneath the cedar, the branch of ironweed again within her hand.  She had found it natural that Ludwell Cary should turn away.  It was not easy to struggle against a misconception, to re-marshal facts and revise judgments—­often it was hard.  She waited quietly, fingering the tufts of purple bloom, her eyes upon the clear sky between the cedar boughs.  When at last she heard his step and looked up, it was with an exquisite kindness in her large, dark eyes.  “It was a natural mistake,” she said.  “Do not think that I blame you.  It is hard to believe in good when we think we see evil.”

“I am thankful,” he answered, “that you are back in your shrine.  Forgive me my error.”

She looked at him fixedly.  “But concerning Lewis—­there, too, was error.  Why should you continue enemies?”

There was a silence, then Cary spoke, sadly and bitterly.  “You must leave me that.  There are men who are born to be antagonists.  When that is so, they find each other out over half the world, and circumstance may be trusted to square for them a battle-ground.  Mr. Rand and I, I fear, will still be enemies.”

“Then what I have told you makes no difference—­”

“You are mistaken there.  What you have told me shall have its weight.”

“Why, then,” cried Jacqueline, “you cannot judge him as you have been judging throughout a spring and summer!  You are just and generous—­will you not try to be friends?  Ere this men have left off being foes, and many and many a battlefield is now thick with wild flowers.  I should be happy if you and Lewis would clasp hands.”

Her voice was persuasion’s own, and there was a tremulous smile upon her red lips, and a soft light in her dark eyes.  “There is a thing that I have long divined,” she said, “and that is the strange regard for what you think and what you are that exists deep, deep down in his mind.  It lies so deep that he is mainly ignorant that it is there.  He thinks that you and he are all inimical.  But it is there like an ancient treasure far down in the ocean depths, far below the surface storm.  There is in him a preoccupation with you.  Often and often, when questions of right and wrong arise, I know that his thought descends to that secret place where he keeps an image of you!  I know that he interrogates that image, ‘Is it thus or so that you would do?’ And if, at times, scornfully or sullenly or with indifference, he does the opposite to what the image says, yet none the less at the next decision will his thought fly to that same judgment bar!  It is an attraction that he fights against, a habit of the mind that he would break if he could—­but it is there—­indeed, indeed it is there!  It is despotic—­I do not think that he can escape.  Ah, if you and he were friends, you would be friends indeed!” She looked at him pleadingly, with her hand outstretched.

Cary shook his head.  “You are mistaken,” he said harshly.  “I am conscious of no place where my spirit and that of Mr. Rand may touch.  I cannot explain; we are enemies:  you must let us fight it out.”