the books, of all that the little girl named Jacqueline had told him, sitting under the apple tree beside the stream that flowed between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road.  As a boy, he would have been puzzled to choose between “Will you go to Heaven?” and “Will you go to Fontenoy?” The one seemed as remote, as unattainable, and as happy as the other.  The advantage was possibly with Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself.  He could not have described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew every room at Fontenoy.  Before he was laid in it, he had known the blue room, the roses on the curtains, and the peacock-feathered mandarin forever climbing a dull yellow screen.  The library should be below, with the bookshelves, and the glass door opening on the snowball bushes.  Outside his window was the flower garden.  He had seen the garden with his bodily eyes, for there was the morning he had spent at Fontenoy.  In the desert of his hardly-treated, eager, and longing youth the place and the life of which the girl who came to Mrs. Selden’s had told him was become the vision of an oasis and a paradise.  The magic word was Fontenoy.  If Gideon Rand or Adam Gaudylock chanced to pronounce it, it was as though the Captain of the Thieves had said, “Open Sesame!” The cave door opened, and he saw strange riches.

That day at Fontenoy!  He tried to recall it, but it did not stand out in his memory; it was curiously without edge.  Trying to remember was like remembering a dream, delicious and evasive.  The child named Jacqueline had changed to a girl named Jacqueline.  She had spoken to him shyly, and he had answered with much greater shyness, with a reddening cheek and a stumbling tongue.  He remembered her dress, a soft blue stuff that he was afraid of touching, and he remembered how burning was his consciousness of his coarse shoes, his shirt of osnaburg, the disreputable hat upon his sunburnt hair.  Then they had walked in the garden, and sat on the steps of a summer house, and he had been very happy after all.  And then a black boy had come to tell him that the Colonel was ready with the receipt he was to carry back to the Three-Notched Road.  He said good-bye with great awkwardness, and went away, and he saw the girl no more for a long, long time, for so long a time that insensibly her image faded.  It was in the October of that year that he went to Richmond with Gideon, and met Mr. Jefferson in the bookshop by the bridge.

The years that followed that meeting!  Rand, lying still upon his pillows, with his eyes upon the yellow mandarin, passed them in review,—­well, they had not been wasted!  Usually he saw the approximate truth about himself, and he knew that these years of toil and achievement were honourable to him.  He thought of all those years, and then he turned his head upon the pillow and faced through widely opened windows the misty, fragrant morning.  His mind turned with suddenness to a morning two summers past.