r face away from
him.

Viney was carefully nursed. The doctor came to see her regularly. She
was fed with dainty food, and no expense was spared to effect her
cure. In due time she recovered from the paralytic stroke, in all
except the power of speech, which did not seem to return. All of
Dudley's attempts to learn from her the whereabouts of the money were
equally futile. She seemed willing enough, but, though she made the
effort, was never able to articulate; and there was plainly some
mystery about the hidden gold which only words could unravel.

If she could but write, a few strokes of the pen would give him his
heart's desire! But, alas! Viney may as well have been without hands,
for any use she could make of a pen. Slaves were not taught to read or
write, nor was Viney one of the rare exceptions. But Dudley was a man
of resource--he would have her taught. He employed a teacher for her,
a free coloured man who knew the rudiments. But Viney, handicapped by
her loss of speech, made wretched progress. From whatever cause, she
manifested a remarkable stupidity, while seemingly anxious to learn.
Dudley himself took a hand in her instruction, but with no better
results, and, in the end, the attempt to teach her was abandoned as
hopeless.

Years rolled by. The fall of the Confederacy left the slaves free and
completed the ruin of the Dudley estate. Part of the land went, at
ruinous prices, to meet mortgages at ruinous rates; part lay fallow,
given up to scrub oak and short-leaf pine; merely enough was
cultivated, or let out on shares to Negro tenants, to provide a living
for old Malcolm and a few servants. Absorbed in dreams of the hidden
gold and in the search for it, he neglected his business and fell yet
deeper into debt. He worried himself into a lingering fever, through
which Viney nursed him with every sign of devotion, and from which he
rose with his mind visibly weakened.

When the slaves were freed, Viney had manifested no desire to leave
her old place. After the tragic episode which had led to their mutual
undoing, there had been no relation between them but that of master
and servant. But some gloomy attraction, or it may have been habit,
held her to the scene of her power and of her fall. She had no kith
nor kin, and her affliction separated her from the rest of mankind.
Nor would Dudley have been willing to let her go, for in her lay the
secret of the treasure; and, since all other traces of her ailment