A pang ran through him, acrid and fiery.  It was not like the vapour of distaste and dislike, of which he had been conscious on the day of the election.  That had been cold and clinging; this was a burning and a poisoned arrow.  It killed the softening, the consciousness of charm, the spell of Cary’s kindness while he lay there helpless in the blue room.  Not since the old days when his heart was hot against his father, had he felt such venom, such rancour.  That had been a boy’s wild revolt against injustice; this passion was the fury of the adolescent who sees his rival.  He looked at Cary through a red mist.  This cleared, but a seed that was in Rand’s nature, buried far, far down in the ancestral earth, swelled a little where it lay in its dim chasm.  The rift closed, the glow as of heated iron faded, and Rand bitterly told himself, “He will win; more than that, he deserves to win!  As for you, you are here to behave like a gentleman.”  He turned more fully to Unity, and talked of books and of such matters as he thought might be pleasing to a lady.

Fairfax Cary entered, brushing the drops from his coat-sleeve.  “The rain is coming down,” he said, and with deliberation seated himself beside Miss Dandridge.

“That’s good!” exclaimed the Colonel.  “Now things will grow!—­Jacqueline, child, aren’t you going to sing to us?”

Jacqueline rose, left the window, and went to her harp, Cary following her.  She drew the harp toward her, then raised her clear face.  “What shall I sing?” she asked.

Cary, struck by a note in her voice, glanced at her quickly where she now sat, full in the light of the candles.  She had no colour ordinarily, but to-night the fine pale brown of her face was tinged with rose.  Her eyes were lustrous.  As she spoke she drew her hands across the strings, and there followed a sound, faint, far, and sweet.  Cary wondered.  He was not a vain man, nor over-sanguine, but he wondered, “Is the brightness for me?” The colour came into his own cheek, and a vigour touched him from head to heel.  “I don’t care what you sing!” he said.  “Your songs are all the sweetest ever written.  Sing To Althea!”

She sang.  Rand watched her from the distance—­the hands and the white arm seen behind the gold strings, the slender figure in a gown of filmy white, the warm, bare throat pouring melody, the face that showed the soul within.  All the room watched her as she sang,—­

     “Stone walls do not a prison make,
       Nor iron bars a cage;
     Minds innocent and quiet take
       That for a hermitage.”

Through the window came the sound of rain, the smell of wet box and of damask roses.  Now and then the lightning flashed, showing the garden and the white bloom of locust trees.

     “Minds innocent and quiet take
       That for a hermitage.”

Rand’s heart ached with passionate longing, passionate admiration.  He thought that the voice to which he listened, the voice that brooded and dreamed, for all that it was so angel-sweet, would reach him past all the iron bars of time or of eternity.  He thought that when he came to die he would wish to die listening to it.  The voice sang to him like an angel voice singing to Ishmael in the wilderness.