At five in the afternoon Cary returned, quiet and handsome, ready with
his account of matters at Greenwood, from the stable, upon which Major
Churchill must pronounce, to the drawing-room paper, which awaited Miss
Dandridge's sentence. His behaviour was perfection, but "He's hard hit,"
said his brother to himself. "What, pray, would Miss Churchill have?"
And Unity, "The shepherds and shepherdesses don't match. How can she
have the heart?" And Major Churchill, "Are women blind? This is Hyperion
to a satyr." And Jacqueline, "Oh, miserable me! Is he writing or
reading, or is he lying thinking, there in the blue room?"




CHAPTER X

TO ALTHEA


Adam Gaudylock came, when his leisure served him, to Fontenoy as he went
everywhere, by virtue of his quality of free lance and golden-tongued
narrator of western news. The stress of thought at the moment was to the
West and the empire that had been purchased there; and a man from beyond
Kentucky, with tales to tell of the Mississippi Territory, brought his
own welcome to town, tavern, and plantation. If this were true of all,
it was trebly true of Adam, who had been born open-eyed. As the magnet
draws the filings, so he drew all manner of tidings. News came to him as
by a thousand carrier pigeons. He took toll of the solitary in the brown
and pathless woods, of the boatmen upon fifty rivers, of the Indian
braves about the council-fire, of hunters, trappers, traders, and long
lines of Conestoga wagons, of soldiers on frontier posts, Jesuit