“Yes.  I do not, on the whole, think Fontenoy so changed.”

“Don’t you?  I do.  Well, well, it is not the only place that has changed!  You’ve no sign yet, have you, Cary, of the murderer?”

“He still goes free.”

“If there’s a man in the county that I dislike,” remarked Mr. Hunter, “it is Lewis Rand.  But if he had taken the river road that day as he said he should, he and your brother might have travelled together, and the two would have been a match for the damned gypsy, or whoever it was, that shot Mr. Cary.  Have you ever noticed what little things make all the difference?  Shall I pour for you, too?”

“As he said he should. How do you know that he said he should?”

“Why, he and I slept the night of the sixth of September at the Cross Roads Inn—­”

“Ah!”

“Yes, one gets strange housemates at an inn.  Well, after supper I went out on the porch and began calling to the dogs, and he was there sitting on the steps in the dusk.  The wind was blowing, and there were fireflies, and the dogs were jumping up and down.  ‘Down, Rover!’ said I, ‘Down, Di!  Down, Vixen!’ And then Rand and I talked a bit, and I said to him, ‘The river road’s bad, but it’s much the shortest.’”

“What,” demanded Cary, in a strained voice,—­“what did he answer?”

“He answered, ‘I shall take the river road.’”

Mr. Hunter helped himself to wine.  “I was tired, and he was tired, and I didn’t like him anyway, and wasn’t interested, so I went on calling to the dogs, and we didn’t speak again.  He and his negro boy went on at dawn, and he took, after all, the main road.  He isn’t,” finished Mr. Hunter, “the kind of person you think of as changeable, and it’s a thousand pities he didn’t hold to his first idea!  Things might have been different.”

Cary rose from the table.  “Would you swear, Hunter, to what he said?”

“Why, certainly—­before all the justices in Virginia.  I don’t believe,” said Mr. Hunter, “that my parents could have had good memories, for somehow things slip away from me—­but when I do remember, Cary, I remember for all time!” He drank his wine and looked around him.  “I haven’t been in this room, I don’t believe, for five years!  That was before it was all done over like this.  What a lot of Carys you’ve got hanging on the walls—­and just one left to sit and look at them!  You haven’t a portrait of your brother?”

“No.  Not upon the walls.  If you’re not fatigued, would you object to riding with me to West Hill?  That’s the nearest justice.”

“I’m not at all fatigued.  But I can’t see what you want it taken down for—­”

“Perhaps not,” answered Cary patiently, “but you’ll swear to it, all the same?”

“Why,” said Mr Hunter, “I can have no possible objection to seeing my words in black and white.  I’ll take another glass, and then I’ll ride with you wherever you like.”

At sundown Fairfax Cary, returning to Greenwood alone, gave his horse to Eli, and presently entered the library.  It was a dim old room, unrenewed and unimproved, but the two brothers had loved and frequented it.  Now, in the March sunset, with the fire upon the hearth, with the dogs that had entered with the master, the shadowy corners, and many books, it had an aspect both rough and gracious.  It was a room in which to remember, and it had an air favourable to resolve.