The two rode together up the hill, beneath the arching oaks. The servants appeared, the horses were taken, and Cary and his guest entered the quiet old house. A little later, in the drawing-room, over a blazing fire and a bottle of wine, Mr. Hunter laid aside a somewhat quaint air of injured dignity, and condescended to speak of Fontenoy and of how very changed it was since the old days. "Nothing like so bright, sir, nothing like so bright! I have not thought Miss Dandridge looking cheerful for more than a year--and she used to be the gayest thing! always smiling, and with something witty to say every time I came near! I hate changes. This is good wine, Cary." "Yes. I do not, on the whole, think Fontenoy so changed." "Don't you? I do. Well, well, it is not the only place that has changed! You've no sign yet, have you, Cary, of the murderer?" "He still goes free." "If there's a man in the county that I dislike," remarked Mr. Hunter, "it is Lewis Rand. But if he had taken the river road that day as he said he should, he and your brother might have travelled together, and the two would have been a match for the damned gypsy, or whoever it was, that shot Mr. Cary. Have you ever noticed what little things make all the difference? Shall I pour for you, too?" "_As he said he should._ How do you know that he said he should?" "Why, he and I slept the night of the sixth of September at the Cross Roads Inn--" "Ah!" "Yes, one gets strange housemates at an inn. Well, after supper I went out on the porch and began calling to the dogs, and he was there sitting on the steps in the dusk. The wind was blowing, and there were fireflies, and the dogs were jumping up and down. 'Down, Rover!' said I, 'Down, Di! Down, Vixen!' And then Rand and I talked a bit, and I said to him, 'The river road's bad, but it's much the shortest.'" "What," demanded Cary, in a strained voice,--"what did he answer?" "He answered, 'I shall take the river road.'" Mr. Hunter helped himself to wine. "I was tired, and he was tired, and I didn't like him anyway, and wasn't interested, so I went on calling to the dogs, and we didn't speak again. He and his negro boy went on at dawn, and he took, after all, the main road. He isn't," finished Mr. Hunter, "the kind of person you think of as changeable, and it's a thousand pities he didn't hold to his first idea! Things might have been different." Cary rose from the table. "Would you swear, Hunter, to what he said?" "Why, certainly--before all the justices in Virginia. I don't believe," said Mr. Hunter, "that my parents could have had good memories, for somehow things slip away from me--but when I do remember, Cary, I remember for all time!" He drank his wine and looked around him. "I haven't been in this room, I don't believe, for five years! That was before it was all done over like this. What a lot of Carys you've got hanging on the walls--and just one left to sit and look at them! You haven't a portrait of your brother?"