His father, who had lived to take grim pride in the son he had been used to thwart, was six months dead, and he himself was living alone, as he yet lived alone, in the small house upon the Three-Notched Road.  He lived there with his ambitions, which were many.  That morning he had gone, without knowing why, down through the tobacco-field to the stream which parted his patrimony from his neighbour’s grassy orchard.  And there, beneath the apple tree, across the clear, brown water stood Jacqueline.  He forgot her no more.  “Fontenoy” was again the magic word, the “Open Sesame,” but Jacqueline was the wealth of all the world.  He was young, and he was a man of strong passions who had lived, perforce, a rigid, lonely, and ascetic life.  He had dreamed of most things, and he had dreamed of love.  It was the hectic vision of a hued pool.  Love, entered, proved to be the sea, boundless and strong, salt, clean, and the nurse of life.  He loved Jacqueline to the end of his life; he never swerved from allegiance to the sea.

For a summer month he saw her almost every day,—­twice or thrice beneath the apple tree beside the stream, and at other times in Mrs. Jane Selden’s parlour, porch, or little friendly garden.  He did not tell Jacqueline that he loved her; he had not dared so much.  The fact that he was the son of Gideon Rand while she was a Churchill mattered little to his common sense and his Republicanism.  His blood was clean.  He had never heard of a Rand in prison or a beggar.  Moreover, he meant to make his name an honoured one.  But he was a poor man, though he meant also to become a rich man, and he was a Republican, with no thought of changing his party.  Politics might not matter, perhaps, to Miss Churchill, but they mattered decidedly to her uncles and guardians, whom she loved and obeyed.  Wealth and birth mattered too, to them.  Lewis Rand set no great store upon obedience for obedience’ sake, but he divined that Miss Churchill rarely vexed those she loved.  He had an iron will, and he set his lips, and resolved that this was not the time to speak of that ocean on whose shore he stood.  He meant that the time should come.  The probability of a rejection he looked full in the face, and found that he did not believe in it, though when he looked as fully at his assurance, that, too, became incredibly without foundation.  Jacqueline’s spirit might dwell in the mountains, and never dream of the sea; she gave him no sign, and he could not tell.  The summer month went by; she returned to Fontenoy, and he saw her no more for a long time.  When she was gone, he fell upon work like a bereaved lion upon his prey.  As best he might, he would make that hunting do.  He worked at first with lonely fury, though at last with zest.  Only by this road, he knew, could he enter the gates of Fontenoy.  Success begets success; let him make himself a name, and the gates might open!  When he was not in court, or not most diligently preparing a case, or not instructing