gratitude, and lack of any false shame.  What else he might have learned of her he dimly felt, but he had not covenanted with existence for qualities that would war with a hundred purposes of his brain and will.  He and Jacqueline were lovers yet.  At the sight of each other the delicate fire ran through their veins; in absence the mind felt along the wall and dreamed of the gardens within.  If the woman who had given all was the more constant lover; if the man, while his passion sweetened all his life, yet bowed before his great idol and fought and slaved for Power, it was according to the nature of the two, and there was perhaps no help.

He left the Capitol Square and went on toward the house he had retaken for the second winter in Richmond.  Few were afoot, though now and then a sleigh went by.  Rand’s mind as he walked was busy, not with the debate of to-morrow or the visitor of to-night, the Mathews trial or Tom Mocket’s puerile schemes, but with the letter in the Gazette signed “Aurelius.”  It had been an attack, able beyond the common, certainly not upon Lewis Rand, but upon the party which, in the eyes of the generality, he yet most markedly represented.  In the inflamed condition of public sentiment such attacks were of weekly occurrence; the wise man was he who put them by unmoved.  For the most part Rand was wise.  Federal diatribes upon the Tripoli war, the Florida purchase, the quarrel with Spain, Santo Domingo, Neutral Trade, and Jefferson’s leanings toward France left him cold.  This letter in the Gazette had not done so.  It had gone to the sources of things, analyzing with a coolness and naming with a propriety the more remarkable that it acknowledged, on certain sides, a community of thought with the party attacked.  The result was that, as in civil war, the quarrel, through understanding, was the more determined.  The man who signed “Aurelius” had not spared to point out, with a certain melancholy sternness, the plague spots, the defenceless places.  Moreover, throughout his exposition there ran a harsh and sombre thread, now felt in denunciation and now in ironic praise.  There was more than unveiling of the weakness of any human policy or party; the letter was in part a commination of individual conduct.  No name was used, no direct reference given or example quoted; but one with acumen might guess there was a man in mind when the writer sat in judgment.  The writer himself was perhaps not aware of the fulness of this betrayal, but Lewis Rand was aware.  The paper had angered him, and he had not lacked intention of discovering at whose door it was to be laid.  He had enemies enough—­but this one was a close observer.  The subtlety of the rebuke shook him.  How had the writer who signed “Aurelius” known or divined?  He thought of Major Edward Churchill, but certain reasons made him sure the letter was not his.  And now it seemed that it was Ludwell Cary’s.