A few nights afterward his hands clasped Jessie's cheeks as he bade her farewell, on his departure for Beaufort, where he was to take a coast-wise steamer for New York. It was late October. There was a chill in the air. The leaves of the deciduous trees had turned, and were already falling. The pines were rusty in places, their needles showered to the ground in great numbers; the snow-goose had already been heard piping in the air, on its southward flight; and the waves of the Sound and the sea, as they broke upon the shore, seemed to shiver with a knowledge of approaching winter. But Jessie stood with her lover on the veranda, in the darkness; and her face rested so yieldingly in his palms that Lance half imagined he could carry it away with him. There in the night it was like a picture painted long ago and dimmed by time, yet shining out through the obscurity with its youth and loveliness and passion still intact. No; he could not carry it bodily away with him, but he could take it in his heart; and so he did, holding it there long after the farewell kiss had left his lips. But after he reached New York, and during the long months of winter, the magic of fancy played strange tricks with the image he had brought in his heart. Strive as he would, he could not prevent it from wavering and flickering, as it were, and occasionally taking on a darker hue, so that he seemed at times to be contemplating Adela, instead of Jessie. One of the first things he did was to hunt up some old memoranda in which the tradition concerning Guy Wharton was definitely set down. This cleared up his recollection of it; and his next act was to write to a lawyer of his acquaintance in England, who knew something about the Wharton history, asking him to use his best endeavors to get some authentic likeness of Gertrude Wylde. Unfolding to Hedson, his father's old partner, the paper-mill project, and finding it received with favor, he next exerted himself to form a small syndicate for purchasing and reclaiming the swamp-lands, since that undertaking would require more capital than he cared to venture. But the swamp was not the Treasury of the United States, nor was it a fantasy of such vast dimensions as the Panama Canal; so the syndicate could not be formed. For capital, despite all the cant about its conservatism, is really moved by extremes: it is allured either by a dead certainty or by an equally defunct impossibility. Elbow Crook Swamp was a something between the two. "Wait until spring," Hedson advised. "Then you will have time to explore; and, besides, I may get down there myself to take a look!" Hedson enjoyed the harmless pride of believing that anything at which Hedson had "taken a look," and was able to speak well of, must necessarily glitter like gold to his brother bondholders.