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.