When the major entered his room, Jereboam, his ancient body-servant, was dawdling about putting things to rights, his seamed visage under his white wool suggesting a charred stump beneath a crisp powdering of snow. “Jedge Chalmahs done tellyfoam ter ax yo’ ovah ter Gladden Hall ter suppah ter-night, suh,” he said. “De jedge ’low he gwine git eben wid yo’ fo’ dat las’ game ob pokah when yo’ done lam him.”

“Tell him not to-night, Jerry,” said the other wearily. “Some other time.”

The old darky ruminated as he plodded down to the doctor’s telephone. “Whut de mattah now? He got dat ar way-off-yondah look ergen.” He shook his head forebodingly. “Ah heahed he hummin’ dat tune when he dress hisse’f dis mawnin’. Sing befo’ yo’ eat, cry befo’ yo’ sleep!”

The major had, indeed, a far-away look as he sat there, a heavy lonely figure, that bright morning. It had slipped to his face with the news of the arrival at Damory Court. He told himself that he felt queer. A mocking-bird was singing in a tulip-tree outside, and the gray cat sat on the window-sill, watching the foliage with blinking lust. There was no breeze and the leaves of the Virginia creeper that curled about the sash were trembling with the sensuous delight of the sunshine. Suddenly he seemed to hear elfin voices close to his ear:

“Which was it she loved? Valiant or Sassoon?”

It was so distinct that he started, vexed and disturbed. Really, it was absurd. He would be seeing things next! “Southall may be right about that exercise,” he muttered; “I’ll walk more.” He began the projected reform without delay, striding up and down the room. But the little voices presently sounded again, shouting like gnomes inside a hill:

“Which was it? Valiant or Sassoon?”

“I wish to God I knew!” said the major roughly, standing still. It silenced them, but the sound of his own voice, as though it had been a pre-concerted signal, drew together a hundred inchoate images of other days. There was the well-ordered garden of Damory Court—it rose up, gloomy with night shadows, across his great clothes-press against the wall—with himself sitting on a rustic bench smoking and behind him the candle-lighted library window with Beauty Valiant pacing up and down, waiting for daylight. There was a sun-lighted stretch between two hemlocks, with Southall and he measuring the ground—the grass all dewy sparkles and an early robin teetering on a thorn-bush. Eight—nine—ten—he caught himself counting the paces.

He wiped his forehead. Between the hemlocks now were two figures facing each other, one twitching uncertainly, the other palely rigid; and at one side, held screen-wise, a raised umbrella. In some ghostly way he could see straight through the latter—see the doctor’s hand gripping the handle, his own, outstretched beyond its edge, holding a handkerchief ready to flutter down. A silly subterfuge those umbrellas, but there must be no actual witnesses to the final act of a “gentlemen’s meeting”! A silly code, the whole of it, now happily outgrown! He thought thus with a kind of dumb irritant wonder, while the green picture hung a moment—as a stone thrown in air hangs poised at height before it falls—then dissolved itself in two sharp crackles, with a gasping interval between. The scene blurred into a single figure huddling down—huddling down—

“Which did she love?” The major shook his head helplessly. It was, after all, only the echo, become all at once audible on a shallow woman’s lips, of a question that had always haunted him. It had first come to him on the heels of that duel, when he had stood, somewhat later that hateful morning, holding a saddled horse before the big pillared porch. It had whispered itself then from every moving leaf. “Sassoon or Valiant?” If she had loved Sassoon, of what use the letter Valiant was so long penning in the library? But—if it were Valiant she loved? The man who, having sworn not to lift his hand against the other, had broken his sacred word to her! Who had stained the unwritten code by facing an opponent maddened with liquor! Yet, what was there a woman might not condone in the one man? Would she read, forgive and send for him?

The major laughed out suddenly, harshly, in the quiet room, and looked down as if he expected to see that letter still lying in his hand. But the laugh could not still a regular pulsing sound that was in his ears—elfin like the voices, but as distinct—the sound of a horse’s hoofs going from Damory Court.

He had heard those hoof-beats echo in his brain for thirty years!