to
trifle. Neither did his thoughts or feelings trouble him; he sat and
sharpened a small penknife on his boot.

His mind--his occasional transient meditation--was the more comfortable
because he was one of those few who had coolly and unsentimentally
allowed Honore Grandissime to sell their lands. It continued to grow
plainer every day that the grants with which theirs were classed--grants
of old French or Spanish under-officials--were bad. Their sagacious
cousin seemed to have struck the right standard, and while those titles
which he still held on to remained unimpeached, those that he had
parted with to purchasers--as, for instance, the grant held by this
Capitain Jean-Baptiste Grandissime--could be bought back now for half
what he had got for it. Certainly, as to that, the Capitain might well
have that quietude of mind which enabled him to find occupation in
perfecting the edge of his penknife and trimming his nails in the dark.

By and by he put up the little tool and sat looking out upon the
prospect. The time of greatest probability had not come, but the voudou
might choose not to wait for that; and so he kept watch. There was a
great stillness. The cocks had finished a round and were silent. No dog
barked. A few tiny crickets made the quiet land seem the more deserted.
Its beauties were not entirely overlooked--the innumerable host of stars
above, the twinkle of myriad fireflies on the dark earth below. Between
a quarter and a half-mile away, almost in a line with the Cherokee
hedge, was a faint rise of ground, and on it a wide-spreading live-oak.
There the keen, seaman's eye of the Capitain came to a stop, fixed upon
a spot which he had not noticed before. He kept his eye on it, and
waited for the stronger light of the moon.

Presently behind the grove at his back she rose; and almost the first
beam that passed over the tops of the trees, and stretched across the
plain, struck the object of his scrutiny. What was it? The ground, he
knew; the tree, he knew; he knew there ought to be a white paling
enclosure about the trunk of the tree: for there were buried--ah!--he
came as near laughing at himself as ever he did in his life; the
apothecary of the rue Royale had lately erected some marble headstones
there, and--

"Oh! my God!"

While Capitain Jean-Baptiste had been trying to guess what the
tombstones were, a woman had been coming toward him in the shadow of the
hedge. She was not expecting to meet him; sh