"It is the wind in the beech leaves."
She put an arm across her eyes. "How long is he to lie there, stretched out upon the wet rocks, beside the stream? Oh, heartless!"
"The storm and darkness have made it long. He will be found this morning."
"He never was your enemy, Lewis. You thought him that, but he never was, he never was!"
"I want to tell you," he said, "that all rage is dead. I feel as though I had left anger far behind, and why there was in my mind so great venom and rancour I no longer know. Envy and jealousy, too, are gone. They have been struck out of life, and other things have come to take their place."
"Ay," she cried, "what other things! O God, O God!"
There was a long silence, while the wind sighed in the beech tree and the fire muttered on the hearth. Jacqueline sat in the flowered chair, her raised arms resting upon its back, her head buried in her arms. Rand, leaning against the mantel, gazed with sombre eyes at her strained and motionless form. As he stood there, his mind began to move through the galleries where she was painted. He saw her, a child, beneath the apple tree, and in her blue gown that day in the Fontenoy garden, and then again beneath the apple tree, a child no longer, but the woman whom he loved. He saw her face above him the afternoon they laid him in the blue room, and he saw her singing to her harp in the Fontenoy drawing-room,—
"The thirst that from the soul doth rise—"
He saw the next morning—the summer-house, the box, the mockingbird in the poplar tree, the Seven Sisters rose—and then their marriage eve, and that fair first summer on the Three-Notched Road, and all the three years of their wedded life. The picture of her was everywhere, and not least in the house on Shockoe Hill. He saw her as she had been one snowy evening in February, and he saw her as she had looked the hour of his return from Williamsburgh—the pleading, the passion, and the beauty. And now—now—
The wind sighed again without the windows, and Jacqueline drew a shuddering breath. He spoke. "Jacqueline!"