I have the honour to restore to you the letter which you will find enclosed. If you ask how it came into my hands, I have but to say that, in times of crisis and peril, rules of conduct, on the part of a government as of an individual, have somewhat to bow to necessity. Enough that it did come into my hands--last autumn. Judge if I have used it against you! It is now returned to you because I no longer conceive it necessary to hold it. I might have burned it; I prefer that you shall do so. I have but a word to add to our conversation of last August at Monticello. I am a man of strong affections. Your youth and all the eager service you did me in those years, and the great hopes I had for you, endeared you to me. These things are present in my mind. Were they not so, you would have heard from me in other wise! Were they not so, that which I now enclose should not travel back to the writer's hand; it should remain, distinct and black, upon your Country's records, for your children's children to read with burning cheeks! I spare you, but you are of course aware that the affection of which I spoke is dead, dead as the trust with which I regarded you, or as the pride with which I dwelt upon your future! Reread and destroy that which I place in your hand. THOMAS JEFFERSON. Jacqueline laid down the large, blue, crackling sheet, and took from the floor beside her, where it had fallen, the President's enclosure. Hand and eye moved mechanically; she neither thought nor feared. Her judgment was in suspension, and she was unconscious of herself or of her act. The seals upon this second letter were broken. She unfolded it. On the outside it was addressed in a hand that, had she thought, she would have recognised for Tom Mocket's, to an undistinguished person at Marietta upon the Ohio; within, the writing was her husband's and the address was to Aaron Burr. The date was last August, the subject-matter the disruption of the Republic and the conquest of Mexico, and the detail of plans included the arrangement by which Rand was to leave Albemarle, ostensibly to examine a purchase of land beyond the mountains He would leave, however, not to return. Once out of the country, he with his wife would press on rapidly to the Ohio, to Blennerhassett's island. The summer night deepened, hot and languorous, with a sweep of moths to the candle flames, with vagrant odours of flowering vines and vagrant sounds of distant laughter, voices, footsteps down the long street. Jacqueline sat very still, the letter in her lap. The curtains at the window moved in the fitful air. Through the open doors from the kitchen in the yard behind the house came the strumming of a banjo, then Joab's deep bass:-- "Go down, go down, Moses, Tell Pharaoh let us go! Go down, go down, Moses, King Pharaoh, let us go!"