“Yaas, marster.”

“The mare’s spent.  No need to give her this rough travelling.  Take the main road and take it slowly.  Let her walk, and when you reach Red Fields, stop and have her fed.  I’ll go and go fast by the river road.”

Master and slave parted, the latter keeping to the sunny thoroughfare, the former plunging into the narrow, heavily shaded track that ran through ravine and over ridge, now beside the water and now in close woods of birch and hemlock.  The road was bad, but Selim and his master bent to it grimly, with no nice avoidance of rut or stone or sunken place.  To the horse there was before him food and rest, to the man his home.  They took at the same pace the much of rough and the little of smooth, and the miles fell behind them.  The sun was high, but there were threatening masses of clouds, with now and then a distant roll of thunder.  The road was solitary, little used at any time, and to-day as lonely a woodland way as might well be conceived.

Rand rode with closed lips, and with the mark between his brows.  Passion was having its way with him, such passion as had lived with him, now drowsing, now fiercely awake, in the days at Richmond between his return from Williamsburgh and the close of the trial.  He saw Roselands and Jacqueline beneath the beech tree, but he also saw, and that with more distinctness, the face and form of the man who rode toward Greenwood.  He longed for Jacqueline, but he had not forgiven her.  He knew that he would when he saw her face—­would forgive her with a cry for the waste of the hot, revengeful days, the sleepless nights, since they had parted.  Her face swam before him, between the hemlock boughs, but he was not ready yet to forgive, not yet, not until he got to Roselands and she met him with her wistful eyes!  He was not a fool; the Absolute within him knew where lay the need for forgiveness, but it was deeply overlaid with human pride and wrath.  He was at the old, old trick of anger with another when the fault was all his own.  As for Ludwell Cary—­

His hand closed with force upon the bridle and his eyes narrowed.  “From the first, from that day upon the Justice’s Bench, from that day when we gathered nuts together, I must have hated.  Now it is warp and woof, warp and woof!” He touched Selim with the spur.  “If there were truly a heaven and truly a hell, and I, in flames myself, saw him in Abraham’s bosom, not to escape from that torment would I call to him, ’Once we were neighbours, once it seemed that we might have been friends—­come down, come down and help me, Cary!’”

He laughed, a harsh sound that came back from the rock above him.  By no means always, far from even often, a hardened or an evil man, to-day the stream of thought was stirred and sullied from every black pool and weedy depth, and there came floating up folly, waste, and sin.  His reason slept.  Had he, by some Inquisitor not to be disobeyed, been suddenly obliged to give why and wherefore for his