Jacqueline gazed at the two for a moment, and made as if to speak, but the words died in her throat.  She uttered a broken cry, turned, groped a little for the door, found and opened it, and was gone.  They heard the click of her slippers upon the stairs, and presently the closing of a blind in the room that was hers.

The brothers sat heavily on in the sunshine-flooded library, the elder red and fuming, the younger silent and saturnine.  At last Colonel Dick broke out, “What the devil ails her, Edward?  Every decent young fellow in the county comes to Fontenoy straight as a bee to the honey-pot!  I’ve heard them sighing for her and Unity, but I never could see that she favoured one man more than another,—­and she’s no coquette like Unity!  Except for that fine blush of hers, I’d never have thought.  What do you think, Edward?”

“The ways of women are past my finding out,” said Edward.  “Let it rest for a while, Dick.”  He rose from his chair stiffly, like an old man.  “Let Cary go home to-morrow as he intends.  ’Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ they say.  She may find that she misses him, and may look for him when he comes riding over.  Never fear but he’ll ride over often!  He mustn’t guess, of course, that you have spoken to her.  And that’s all we can do, Dick, except—­” Major Edward walked stiffly across the floor and paused before the portrait of his brother Henry, dead and gone these many years.  The face looked imperiously down upon him.  Henry had stood for something before he died,—­for grace and manly beauty, pride and fire.  The Major’s eyes suddenly smarted.  “Poor white trash,” he said between his teeth, “and Henry’s daughter!” He turned and came back to the table.  “Dick! just as soon as you can, you clear the house of old Gideon Rand’s son!”

“What’s he got to do with it?” asked Colonel Dick.

“I don’t know,” said the other.  “But I want him out of the blue room, and out of Fontenoy! and now, Dick, I’ve got a piece to write this morning on the designs of Aaron Burr.”

At five in the afternoon Cary returned, quiet and handsome, ready with his account of matters at Greenwood, from the stable, upon which Major Churchill must pronounce, to the drawing-room paper, which awaited Miss Dandridge’s sentence.  His behaviour was perfection, but “He’s hard hit,” said his brother to himself.  “What, pray, would Miss Churchill have?” And Unity, “The shepherds and shepherdesses don’t match.  How can she have the heart?” And Major Churchill, “Are women blind?  This is Hyperion to a satyr.”  And Jacqueline, “Oh, miserable me!  Is he writing or reading, or is he lying thinking, there in the blue room?”

CHAPTER X

TO ALTHEA