en as the
visible impress of that mystery, the bitterness of which had misshaped
the dead man's nature; but the resolute lips had closed for ever on
their secret, and the broken spirit had gone perhaps to learn how poor a
thing its pride had been.

Though he had lived continuously at the Barony for almost a quarter of a
century, there was none among his neighbors who could say he had looked
on that thin, aquiline face in all that time. Yet they had known much
of him, for the gossip of the slaves, who had been his only friends in
those years he had chosen to deny himself to other friends, had gone far
and wide over the county.

That notable man of business, Jonathan Crenshaw--and this superiority
was especially evident when the business chanced to be his own--was
closeted in the library with a stranger to whom rumor fixed the name of
Bladen, supposing him to be the legal representative of certain remote
connections of the old general's.

Crenshaw sat before the flat-topped mahogany desk in the center of the
room with several well-thumbed account-books open before him. Bladen, in
riding dress, stood by the window.

"I suppose you will buy in the property when it comes up for sale?" the
latter was saying.

Mr. Crenshaw had already made it plain that General Quintard's creditors
would have lean pickings at the Barony, intimating that he himself was
the chiefest of these and the one to suffer most grievously in pocket.
Further than this, Mr. Bladen saw that the old house was a ruin,
scarcely habitable, and that the thin acres, though they were many and
a royal grant, were of the slightest value. Crenshaw nodded his
acquiescence to the lawyer's conjecture touching the ultimate fate of
the Barony.

"I reckon, sir, I'll want to protect myself, but if there are any of
his own kin who have a fancy to the place I'll put no obstacle in their
way."

"Who are the other creditors?" asked Bladen.

"There ain't none, sir; they just got tired waiting on him, and when
they began to sue and get judgment the old general would send me word
to settle with them, and their claims passed into my hands. I was in too
deep to draw out. But for the last ten years his dealings were all with
me; I furnished the supplies for the place here. It didn't amount to
much, as there was only him and the darkies, and the account ran on from
year to year."

"He lived entirely alone, saw no one, I understand," said Bladen.

"Alone with his two or th