Rand paused before her. "How should I help my kind, now—now?"
His old friend looked at him a little wonderingly. "Do the simple right, my dear, whatever it is that you see before you."
"The simple right! And to rejoice the heart of my Maker—if I have one?"
"Do the right strongly and surely, Lewis."
"Whatever it is?"
"Whatever it is." Mrs. Jane Selden looked at him thoughtfully, her hands clasped upon her key-basket. "I'm only an old woman—just a camp-follower with an interest in the battle. I wish that you had had a friend of your own age—a man, and your equal in power and grasp. Gaudylock and Mocket and such—they're well enough, but you're high above them, you're a sort of Emperor to them. Could you but have had such a friend, Lewis—a man like the Carys—"
"For God's sake, don't!" cried Rand hoarsely. He poured out a glass of wine, looked at it, and pushed it away. "I will go now, for there is work waiting for me in town, and at home Do as I tell you about Carfax. Good-bye, good-bye!"
Out upon the road, passing through a strip of pine and withered scrub, he raised his hand, and for some moments covered his eyes. When he dropped it, he saw, in the strong purples of the winter evening, again that misty figure, riding this time, riding near him, not in the road, but apparent in the air against and between the tall trunks of pines. "Cary," he said again, "Cary!"
There was no response from the figure in the air. "Cary," cried Rand, "I would we had been friends!"
Selim reached the open country; the pines fell away, the form was gone. Rand touched his horse with the spur and rode fast between brown stubble-fields darkening to the hills and to the evening sky. "Friends," he repeated, "friends! That would be on terms of my doing the simple right—the simple right after the most complicated wrong! Terms! there are no terms."