CHAPTER XXIV THE MAN WHO WON Richard De Jarnette sat alone in the library at Elmhurst--the home of his fathers for generations back. It was a gloomy room. The furniture and the hangings were dark and massive. Everything spoke of a bygone age and a lack of woman's touch. Faded moreen curtains hung over Venetian blinds and shut out God's glorious sunlight. Both had been new when Richard De Jarnette's mother was a bride. Nobody had ever thought it worth while to change them. In the center of the room the claw-footed mahogany table was piled with books and papers. Mammy Cely kept the place beautifully clean, but she was forbidden to touch the table. The very books on the shelves belonged to another century,--the English poets bound in sheep, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson's Dictionary--well worn, Josephus, D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation," and kindred sorts, and on the lower shelves Scott's Bible--in many ponderous tomes, and the "Comprehensive Commentary." On one shelf in the old-fashioned "secretary" were a few volumes that spoke a woman's taste at a time when women must not read the virile things their brothers found good food. Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Sigourney in blue and gold, a Flora's Album, the "Language of Flowers," and Gift Books and "Annuals" in resplendent bindings that suggested the poverty within. These books had been Richard's mother's, and they looked cowed and overshadowed by the masculine array that lined the room. All the moneyed De Jarnettes had been planters, but with the reading habit, and there had been a preacher and a doctor in the family who, dying without issue, had bequeathed their libraries to the shelves of Elmhurst. The red cover of the book that Richard De Jarnette held in his hand seemed almost an impertinence among this staid, respectable assemblage in sheep and calf. It looked so new, and fresh and modern. But while it was all this, it was not holding him to-night. It would have taken more even than dear John Fiske to shut out from his ears the echo of this day's doings--fragments from the attorney's pleas, Mrs. Pennybacker's incisive whisper which reached his ear and lodged there, "Who gave him that right?" He tried to throw it all aside. It was over now and he had won. The child was upstairs safe asleep. He was sick and tired of the subject. He would get his mind on something else. It was for this that he had brought out "Virginia and her Neighbors." And he turned resolutely to the book. But somehow the face of the woman he had defeated rose up between him and the printed page. He could not see the words for it. For one brief space he had held his vanquished enemy passive in his arms, her head against his breast. He could not rid himself of the sight of her face as she lay there.