There was a long silence, while the wind sighed in the beech tree and the fire muttered on the hearth.  Jacqueline sat in the flowered chair, her raised arms resting upon its back, her head buried in her arms.  Rand, leaning against the mantel, gazed with sombre eyes at her strained and motionless form.  As he stood there, his mind began to move through the galleries where she was painted.  He saw her, a child, beneath the apple tree, and in her blue gown that day in the Fontenoy garden, and then again beneath the apple tree, a child no longer, but the woman whom he loved.  He saw her face above him the afternoon they laid him in the blue room, and he saw her singing to her harp in the Fontenoy drawing-room,—­

“The thirst that from the soul doth rise—­”

He saw the next morning—­the summer-house, the box, the mockingbird in the poplar tree, the Seven Sisters rose—­and then their marriage eve, and that fair first summer on the Three-Notched Road, and all the three years of their wedded life.  The picture of her was everywhere, and not least in the house on Shockoe Hill.  He saw her as she had been one snowy evening in February, and he saw her as she had looked the hour of his return from Williamsburgh—­the pleading, the passion, and the beauty.  And now—­now—­

The wind sighed again without the windows, and Jacqueline drew a shuddering breath.  He spoke.  “Jacqueline!”

She moved slightly.  “Yes, Lewis.”

“The night is quiet, after the storm.  He lies at rest beside the stream.  This morning he will be found, lifted tenderly, lamented, mourned.  It is not a gruesome place.  I remember trees and fluttering birds.  He sleeps—­he sleeps—­like Duncan he sleeps well at last.  Is he to be so pitied?”

She moaned, “Yes—­but you also, you also!  Oh, break, break!”

“Listen, Jacqueline.  It lacks but an hour of dawn.  When it is day, you may give me up.  Rouse Joab and send for the sheriff and your uncles and for Fairfax Cary.  I will dress and await them in the library.  Indeed, you may do it now—­there’s no need to wait for dawn.”

She rose from her chair and went the length of the room, resting at last, with raised arms and covered face, against the farthest window.  He spoke on.  “If all thought alike, Jacqueline, if all saw action and consequence with one vision—­but we do not so, no, not on this earth!  You and I are sundered there.  Perhaps it is to my shame that it is so,—­I cannot tell.  What you asked for this afternoon, that confession, that decision, that accord with justice and acceptance of penalty, I cannot give freely and of conviction, Jacqueline.  Why did you think I had that exaltation of mind?  I have it not; no, nor one man in five hundred thousand!  The man I—­murdered—­perhaps possessed it; indeed, I think that he did.  But I—­I do not own it, nor can I see matters with another’s vision.  I see a struggle to prevent disgrace and disaster, to retrieve and hold an endangered standing-room—­a