He turned, and took up from a chair his hat and riding-whip “’Tis no easy feat,” he said, with grimness, “to put one’s self in the place of Lewis Rand.  But then, other things are not easy either.  I’ll not grudge a little straining.”  He stood before the Major, holding out his hand—­a handsome figure in his mourning dress, resolute, quiet, no longer breathing outward grief, ready even, when occasion demanded, to smile or to laugh, but essentially altered and fixed to one point.  “I think, sir, I will look now for Unity.  There is something I wish to say to her.  Good-bye, sir.  I shall not come again until after New Year.”

Miss Dandridge, mounting the hill from the quarter, and sitting down to rest upon a great, sun-bathed stone beside the foot-path, heard a quick step and looked up to greet her betrothed.  “It is so warm and bright,” she said, “in this fence-corner that I feel as though summer were on the way.  The stone is large—­there’s room for you, too, here in the sunshine.”

He sat down beside her.  “You have been making Christmas for the quarter?”

“I’ve been telling them that Christmas is to be bright.  I have not seen you for a week.”

He took her hand and pressed it to his lips.  “Unity, I have been sitting there at home at Greenwood, thinking, thinking!  Page came to see me, but I was such poor company that he did not tarry long.  I rode here to-day to say something to you—­Unity, don’t you think you had better give me up?”

“No!  I don’t—­”

“I do not think it is fair to you.  I am not the man you knew—­except in loving you I am not the man who sat with you beneath the catalpa.  I am bereaved of the better part of me, and I see one object held up before me like a wand.  I must reach that wand or all effort is fruitless, and there is no achievement and no harvest in my life.  I may be years in reaching it.  I love you dearly and deeply, but I am not given over to love.  I am given over to reaching that wand.  It has seemed to me, sitting there at Greenwood, it has seemed to me after Page’s visit, that I should give you freedom—­”

“It seems to me, sitting here upon this stone,” answered Unity, “that I will not take it!  And what under the sun Mr. Page’s visit—­I will wait until you are at leisure to love me as—­as—­as you loved me that day under the catalpa when you flung Eloisa to Abelard into the rosebushes!  Don’t—­don’t!  I like to cry a little.”

“I have determined,” he said, “to tell you what I am doing.  You know that I seek to discover my brother’s murderer, but you have not guessed that I know his name.  It is Lewis Rand whom I pursue, and it is Lewis Rand whom I will convict of that deed on Indian Run!”

She gave a cry.  “Lewis Rand!  Fair, Fair, that’s impossible!”

“Is it?” he asked sombrely.  “Impossible to prove, perhaps, though I’m not prepared to grant that either, but true, Unity, true as many another black ‘impossible’ has been!”