It craved pardon for the heat and the haste
displayed by me when we parted at Sceaux; it implored one last
interview before I left the colonies forever. I had not the art to
conceal or veil my meaning, but told it out and plainly. Such a note
as an idiotic boy might pen, or a simpering school lass be set
fluttering to receive.

I bade my man deliver this to Madame de la Mora on the morrow, charging
him minutely and repeatedly to see it safe in her own hands. So
careful was I, I did not doubt that even so stupid a lout as Jacques
understood me perfectly.

His further instructions were to meet me at the Bay when I should
return in the evening from my visit to Colonel d'Ortez, and there
beside its rippling waters--or so I had arranged--I was to receive her
answer.

It had now turned late of the night, and I sought repose. Sleep evaded
my bed. What with my own restless desires, my chiding sense of
ill-doing, and the d'Ortez story I had read, I tossed and tumbled
through the remaining hours of darkness. Tumbled and tossed, whilst
the sins and sufferings of men long dead passed and repassed with their
spectral admonitions.

Early on the morrow, while the day was yet cool, I crossed the Bay, and
climbed the slope of sand before the lonely house. It looked more
deserted and desolate than I had ever seen it. The stillness of
solitary death clung as a pall about the place. Pachaco, the Indian
servant, sat beside the gate, as motionless as the post against which
he leaned.

"How is the master, Pachaco?" I inquired, passing in.

"Him die yesterday," came the stolid reply.

"What? Dead! When?"

"The shadows were at the longest," he answered, indicating by a gesture
the western horizon.

I hurried into the master's room. In the same position he had
occupied, when, months ago, he had beckoned me to remain, he sat there,
dead in his chair. His clothing hung about him in that sharply angular
fashion in which garments cling to a corpse. Long, thin locks were
matted above his brow, awesomely disarranged. But the pose of his
head, drooped a little forward, suggested a melancholy reverie, nothing
more.

The golden locket, which he had shown me that well-remembered night,
rested within his shrunken palm. I noted that the side was open which
revealed the blazing bar of red. As if absorbed in that same
unpleasant thought, there sat the master, dead; dead, and I alone knew
his story. How vividly the old man's s