“It is getting dark—­I must go to bed,” said Deb.  “Uncle Edward, who pays the devil?”

“His hosts, child,” answered Uncle Edward, looking very grim and very old.

CHAPTER VII

THE BLUE ROOM

The news of the accident to Lewis Rand spread far and wide.  Both as a lawyer and as Mr. Jefferson’s adjutant he had become in two years’ time a marked man.  Federalist and Republican were agreed that the recent election was but a foot in the stirrup.  Another two years might see him—­almost anywhere.  He was likely to ride far and to ride fast.  To the Federalists his progress from the tobacco-fields to the Elysian Heights of office was but another burning sign of the degeneracy of the times and the tendencies of Jefferson.  On the other hand, the Republicans quoted the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence, and made the name of Lewis Rand as symbolic as a liberty pole.  He was bon enfant, bon Republicain.  Virginia, like Cornelia, numbered him among her starry gems.  He was of the Gracchi.  He was almost anything Roman, Revolutionary, and Patriotic that the mind of a perfervid poet could conjure up and fix in a corner of the Argus or the Examiner.  Every newspaper in the state mentioned the accident, and in a letter from a Gentleman of Virginia, an account of it was read by the subscribers to the Aurora.

All this was somewhat later, when the stage-coach and the mail-rider had distributed the slow-travelling news.  In the mean time Lewis Rand lay in the curtained bed in the blue room at Fontenoy, and wondered at that subtle force called Chance.  The blue roses upon the hangings, the blue willows and impossible bridges of the china, the apple-cheeked moon surmounting the face of the loud-ticking clock were not more fantastically unnatural than that he, Lewis Rand, should be lying there between the linen sheets, in the sunny morning stillness of the fourth day after his fall, listening for the stir of the awakening house, for one step upon the stair, and for one voice.  He was where he had desired to be; he was at Fontenoy; but the strangeness of his being there weighed upon him.  He would hear the step and the voice; chance had brought him past every ward of a hostile house, and had laid him there in the blue room to be generously pitied and lavishly cared for; chance had given him leverage.  To each the chaos of his own nature; if, with Rand, the Spirit brooded none too closely over the face of the deep, yet was there light enough to tread by.  As he lay in the blue room, watching the early sunlight steal through the window and lay a golden finger on his bed, he had no sense of triumph, no smugness of satisfaction over the attainment of his dream.  He thought of how often as a boy, working under the glare of the sun, in the shadeless tobacco-fields, he had dreamed of the poplars of Fontenoy, the cool porches, the cool rooms, the rest from labour, and