From the quarter below them came the blowing of the afternoon horn.  The short, bright winter day was waning, and though the sun yet dwelt upon the hill-top, the hollow at its base was filled with shadow.  Unity rose from the stone.  “I must go back to the house.  I promised Deb I would read to her.”  She caught her breath.  “It is the Arabian Nights—­and he gave it to her, and she’s always talking of him.  Oh, all of us poor children!  Oh, I used to think the world so sweet and gay!”

“What do you think,” he said, “of the one who turns it bitter?”

She looked at him with pleading eyes.  “Fair, Fair, will you not forego it—­forego vengeance?”

“It is not vengeance,” he answered.  “It is something deeper than that.  I don’t think that I can explain.  It seems to me that it is destiny and all that destiny rests upon.”  He drew her to him and kissed her twice.  “Will you wait for me, wait on no other terms than these?  If you will, God bless you!  If it is a task beyond your strength, God bless you still.  You will do right to give it up.  Which, Unity, which?  And if you wait for me, you must go no more to that man’s house.  If you wait for me, my brother is your brother.”

“I will never give up Jacqueline!”

“I do not ask it.  But you’ll go no more to that house, speak no more to the man she most unhappily wedded.  That is my right—­if you wait for me.”

She turned and threw herself into his arms.  “Oh, Fair, if it is only he himself—­if it is only that dark and wicked man—­if you do not ask me to stop loving her, or writing to her, or seeing her when I can—­”

“That is all—­only to speak no more to that dark and wicked man.”

“Then I’ll wait—­I’ll wait till doomsday!  Oh, the world!  Oh, the thing called love!  Don’t—­don’t speak to me until I cry it out.”

She wept for a while, then dried her eyes and tried to smile.  “That’s over.  Let us go now and—­and read the Arabian Nights.  Oh me, oh me, if we are not merry here, what must Christmas be at Roselands!”

CHAPTER XXXV

THE IMAGE

The murderer of Ludwell Cary unlocked the green door of the office in Charlottesville, entered, and opened the shutters of the small, square windows.  Outside was a tangle of rose-stems, but no leaf or bloom.  The January sunshine streamed palely in, whitening the deal floor and striking against a great land map on the wall.  Upon the hearth had been thrown an armful of hickory and pine.  Rand, kneeling, laid a fire, struck a spark into the tinder, and had speedily a leap and colour of pointed flames.  He rose, opened his desk, drew papers out of pigeon-holes and laid them in order upon the wood, then pushed before it his accustomed chair.  He did not take the latter; instead, after standing a moment with an indescribable air of weary uncertainty, he turned, went back to the firelit hearth, sat down, and, bending forward, hid his face in his hands.