Rand rose from his chair.  “Major Churchill”—­He stopped short, bit his lip, and walked away to the window.  There he drew the curtain slightly aside and stood with brow pressed against a pane, gazing out into the frosty darkness.  A half moon just lifted the wide landscape out of shadow, and from the interlacing boughs of trees the coloured leaves were falling.  Rand looked at the distant mountains, but the eye of his mind travelled farther yet and saw all the country beyond, all the land of the To Be, all the giant valley of the Mississippi, all the rolling, endless plains, all Mexico with snowy peaks and mines of gold.  The apparition did not come dazzlingly.  He was no visionary.  He weighed and measured and reckoned carefully with his host.  But there, beyond the mountains, lay no small part of the habitable world,—­and the race of conquerors had not died with Alexander or Caesar, Cortez or Pizarro!  Witness Marengo and Austerlitz and that throne at Fontainebleau!  He dropped the curtain from his hand and turned to the firelit room and to the tense grey figure on the hearth.  “Major Churchill, if, softened by Jacqueline’s presence there at Fontenoy, you came to-night to Roselands with the simple purpose of making friends with the man she loves, then, sir, that man would be a heartless churl indeed if he were not touched and gratified, and did not accept with eagerness such an overture.  But, sir, but!  There is more, I think, in your visit to-night than meets the eye.  You demand that I shall become my party’s candidate for the governorship.  I answer it is not now possible.  You insist that I shall busy myself with improvements here at Roselands, and to that end you offer to reinforce my purse.  I answer that Roselands does very well, and that I am not in need of money.  You preach to me patriotism and refer to General Washington; you speak poetically of gold versus pinchbeck, and true glory versus fame with drenched wings; you ask me certain questions in a voice that has hardly the ring of friendship—­and last but not least you wish to know if a parcel of land that I have bought over the mountains is situate upon the Washita!  The Washita, Major Churchill, is on the far side of the Mississippi, in Spanish Territory.  May I ask, sir, before I withdraw my welcome to Roselands, by what right you are entitled to put such a question to me, and what is, indeed, the purport of your visit here to-night?”

Major Edward Churchill rose, stark and grey, with narrowed eyes and deliberating, pointing hand.  “You are a villain, sir; yes, sir, a damned, skilled, heart-breaking villain!  Bold! yes, you are bold—­bold as others of your tribe of whom the mythologies tell!  Arrogant as Lucifer, you are more wretched than the slave in your fields!  You might have been upon the side of light; you have chosen darkness.  It will swallow you up, and I, for one, shall say, ‘The night hath its own.’  You have chosen wrongly where you might have chosen