“Hear the frogs in the marsh!” said Rand.  “They are excited to-night.  They know I have brought a princess home.”

“Listen to the cow-bells,” she said.  “I love to hear them, faint and far like that.  I love to think of you, a little barefoot boy, bringing home the cows—­and never, never dreaming once of me!”

“When could that have been?” he asked.  “I have always dreamed of you—­even when ’twas pain to dream!—­There is the first whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will! Once it had the loneliest sound!  The moon is growing brighter.  The dark has come.”

“I love you, Lewis.”

“Darling, darling!  Listen! that is the night horn.  The lights are out in the quarter.  Do you hear the stream—­our stream—­hurrying past the apple tree?  It is hurrying to the sea—­the great sea.  We’ve put out to sea together—­you and I, just you and I!”

“Just you and I!” she echoed.  “Oh, bliss to be together!”

“Let us go,” he whispered.  “Let us go back to the house,” and with his arm around her, they moved up the path between the flowers that had closed with the night.

CHAPTER XIII

THE THREE-NOTCHED ROAD

Lewis Rand and his wife dwelt that summer and autumn in the house on the Three-Notched Road, and were happy there.  If the ghost of Gideon Rand walked, the place, renovated, clean, bright, and homely sweet, showed no consciousness of any influence of the dark.  Passers-by on the dusty road looked curiously at the gay little yard and the feathery mimosa and the house behind the pines.  “Lewis Rand lives there,” they said, and made their horses go more slowly.

The pines hid the porch where Jacqueline sat with her work, or, hands about her knees, dreamed the hours away.  She was much alone, for after the first week Rand rode daily to his office in Charlottesville.  There was no reconciliation with her people.  All her things had been sent from Fontenoy.  Linen that had been her mother’s lay with bags of lavender in an old carved chest from Santo Domingo, and pieces of slender, inlaid furniture stood here and there in the room they called the parlour.  Her candlesticks were upon the mantel, and her harp made the room’s chief ornament.  Her fortune, which was fair, had been formally made over to her and to Rand.  She was glad it was no less; had it been vastly greater, she would only have thought, “This will aid him the more.”  The little place was very clean, very sweet, ordered, quiet, and lovable.  She was a trained housewife as well as the princess of his story, and she made the man she loved believe in Paradise.  Each afternoon when he left the jargon and wrangling of the courtroom his mind turned at once to his home and its genius.  All the way through the town, beckoning him past the Eagle and past every other house or office which had for him an open door, he saw Jacqueline waiting beneath the mimosa at the gate, clad in white, her dark hair piled