“My deah Mistress Gordon!  We are in a world of trouble at the manor-house!  Little Ardea, my grand-daughteh, was taken sick last night, and to-day she’s out of huh head—­think of it, out of huh head! I’m riding hotfoot for Doctah Williams, but Lord of Heaven! it’ll be nigh sundown befo’ I can hope to get back with him.  Could you, my deah madam, faveh us—­”

Thomas Jefferson heard no more; would stay to hear no more.  The forest, always his refuge in time of trial, reached a long finger of scattering oaks down to the opposite side of the creek, and thither he fled, cold to the marrow of his bones, though the sun-heated stone coping of the dam on which he crossed the stream went near to blistering his bare feet as he ran.

From the crotch of one of the oaks—­his watch-tower in other periods of stress—­he saw the Major mount and continue his gallop eastward on the pike; and a little later the ancient Dabney family carriage came and went in a smother of white dust, wheeling in front of the home gate and pausing only long enough to take up his mother hastening to the rescue.

After that he was alone with the hideous tumult of his thoughts.  The girl would die.  He was as sure of it as if the heavens and the earth had instantly become articulate to shout the terrible sentence.  God had taken him at his word!  There would be no intruder to tell him that the woods and the creek belonged to her grandfather.  She would be dead; slain by the breath of his mouth.  And for all the years and years and ages to come, he would be roasting and grilling in that place prepared for the devil and his angels—­and for murderers!

In the acutest misery of it a trembling fit seized him and the oak seemed to rock and sway as if to be rid of him.  When the fit passed he slid to the ground and flung himself face downward under the spreading branches.  The grass was cool to his face, but there was no moisture in it, and he thought of Dives praying that Lazarus might come and put a drop of water on his tongue.

Then the torment took a new and more terrible form.  Though he had never been inside of the gray stone manor-house, his imagination transported him thither; to the house and to a darkened room on the upper floor with a bed in it, and in the bed a girl whose face he could not see.

The girl was dying:  the doctor had told his mother and the Major, and they were all waiting.  Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings.  But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details.  Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated:  the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl’s arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother’s low sobs, and the haggard face of the old Major.

Thomas Jefferson dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it.  Was there no way of escape?