He opened his mouth, shut it again, and stalked sulkily away with Selim.

Aaron walked thoughtfully up the white steps. So the child was up to something, perhaps, after all. He had heard a rumor. Someone had seen her talking to a youth in the Jones Woods. He had dismissed it as ridiculous. He still thought it unlikely. But in any event he was not much disturbed. She was not one of your giddy little flibbertigibbets. All the same, it was surprising, and Aaron was seldom surprised. As in chess, a game in which he excelled, he found it easy to anticipate his opponent's campaign of play, keeping always two, three, or more moves ahead of him. But Theo was not an opponent. She was flesh of his flesh, an infinitely dear projection of himself.

Frowning, he walked down the white-paneled, picture-hung hallway to his library, and relaxed with the thrill of sensuous pleasure the room always gave him. The stoic and the voluptuary lived amicably side by side in his soul. He could be perfectly indifferent to his surroundings, and indeed, upstairs in his bedchamber he slept on a camp cot, and with no other furnishings except a table, chair, and commode.

But this library was his delight. He had added it himself to the back of the house, when, in 1791, he had acquired the lease to this mansion which had housed the John Adamses and General Washington.

It was a spacious room, with three tall windows that gave eastern and southern light. The walls were lined to shoulder height with books, shipload after shipload of them from the presses of England and France. Soft creamy vellum bindings alternated with the dead leaf-brown of calfskin. Their musty odor of ink and old leather pervaded the room like incense.

The polished oak floor was all but hidden by an ingrain carpet, warmly red, decorated with scattered fleurs-de-lis. Ardent francophile that he was, Aaron had snapped it up at an auction, and had often been sardonically amused at the horror this royalist emblem excited in some of his friends. His convictions, and his interests, were republican enough, but he was no fanatic, and a beautiful carpet was a beautiful carpet.

There were two library tables, a sprinkling of lyre-backed chairs, and a sofa, upholstered in crimson satin, from the fashionable workshop of Duncan Phyfe. An elegant little 'traveling-case' on wheels stood near the door, complete with tea caddies and liquor bottles for the refreshment of guests.