Jarvis sat motionless in his carriage watching the easy swing of the arrogantly youthful figure, as it passed down the street. He saw David go in at the front entrance of the Barford Eagle, yet still he sat silent, his brows drawn over brooding eyes. His man, lounging in front of the stables, caught sight of the waiting equipage, and hurried down the driveway. “Any orders, sir?” he asked. “Shall I take the horse, sir?” Jarvis glanced at the man, something of his old irritability flaring up in his look. “No,” he said shortly. “I’m not coming in now.” He spoke sharply to his horse, turned abruptly, and drove rapidly away, past the pollarded willows, over the echoing bridge, and on into the country road beyond, muffled with the accumulated dust of a rainless midsummer. Presently he reached and passed the stone gateway of the Preston farm, and its orchards laden with unripe fruit. He looked at both with the sombre, unseeing intentness of a man who is at war with his deeper instincts. He had been prepared, he supposed, to judge Whitcomb fairly; but his late brief interview with his successful rival had left him bitterly antagonistic to the younger man. David’s very physical beauty infuriated him. He recalled the level glances of his blue eyes, the curve of his lips, the carriage of his handsome head upon his broad shoulders, with a sense of blind, barbaric anger. His frequent references to Barbara, his cool assumption of triumph, his braggart self-assertion, his open disdain of concealment—all were abhorrent, intolerable to Jarvis. But none the less, he fought with and subdued himself. “I am unjust,” he told himself flatly, “because I am jealous.” And he despised himself the more, because recognizing the patent fact he still hated David; still longed to fling him out of his path as he had flung many a stronger man in the past. For the first time in all the years of his life he had become dimly aware of the beauty of self-sacrifice, and of its relations to a pure and true affection. Even while the primal man within foamed under his iron grip, he compelled himself to think tenderly of Barbara, of her loveless youth, of her loneliness, of her heroism. Then he remembered with shame his own persecutions of her woman’s weakness; for so it had come to look to him now. He recalled his brutal insistence, his threats, his unrelenting hardness, sparing himself in nothing, compelling his memory to flash before him every picture which contained them both. He had travelled many miles before he roused to a realization of the lateness of the hour. The long summer twilight had fallen, like a roseate veil, over the rich landscape; the shadows had disappeared with the sun, and the great disk of a silver moon swam in the rosy light reflected from the sunset, which by now burned in crimson and amber splendors behind the misty purple of the hills.