Rand looked at him with dark and sombre eyes.  “Couldn’t you, poor old Tom?  Well, we’ll keep it on awhile together.  I don’t want the doctor.  Once, long ago, I might have doctored myself.”  He laughed.  “Now there’s no bark in Peru—­no balm in Gilead.  Well, what we cannot have, we must do without!  Look out, will you, and see if Young Isham is there with Selim?”

The Three-Notched Road stretched red and stark between rusty cedars and gaunt trunks of locust trees.  It was cold, and overhead the sun was fighting with the clouds.  Rand went rapidly, his powerful horse taking the road with a long and easy stride.  Few were abroad; the bare and frozen fields stretched on either hand to the hills, the hills rose to the mountains, grey and sullen in the changing light.  That meadow, field, and hill had once been mantled with tender verdure, and would be so again, was hard to believe, the land lay so naked and so grim.

Mrs. Selden’s small, red brick mansion appeared among the leafless trees.  Rand checked Selim slightly, gazing at the place with the weary uncertainty he had before exhibited, then turned for the moment from the task, irksome now as were all tasks, and rode on past Mrs. Jane Selden’s to the house in which he had lived with his father and mother, and had lived with Jacqueline.

The place had been rented out since that summer of 1804, but the tenant, failing to make good, was gone, and for some months the house had been vacant.  Rand and Selim moved slowly along the old, old familiar way.  Every stick, every stone, every fence-corner was known to both.  The man let his hand fall upon the brute’s neck.  “We’re going home, Selim,” he said.  “We’re going home.”

It was not now the small, clean place, fresh with whitewash and bright with garden flowers, shone upon by the sun and sung about by birds, to which he had brought Jacqueline.  The tenant had been dull, and the place was fallen into disrepair.  In the winter air and without a leaf or flower, it looked again as it had looked when he and Gideon lived there alone.  He dismounted, fastened Selim to the fence, and entered by the gate beneath the mimosa tree.

That the mimosa had ever shown sensitive leaf and mist of rosy bloom ranked now among other impossibilities.  He stood for a moment looking at it in silence, then walked up the narrow path, mounted the porch steps, and tried the door.  It was locked, but with an effort of all his wasted strength he burst it open and so entered the house.

The rooms were unfurnished and forlorn.  He went from one to another, pausing in each in the middle of the floor, and gazing around as if to replace in that empty square the objects of the past.  This progress made, he looked for a place to rest, but there was neither chair nor bench.  All was bare, unswept, and desolate.  He went into the kitchen, for he remembered the old settle there upon the enormous hearth.  That they could not have removed, it