ant days. Of late years the Charleses had subsided
into the more republican but scarcely less royally carried
magnificence and ease of plantation life along the Mississippi.
Perhaps Grandemont was even Marquis de Brasse. There was that title
in the family. But a Marquis on seventy-five dollars per month!
_Vraiment!_ Still, it has been done on less.

Grandemont had saved out of his salary the sum of six hundred
dollars. Enough, you would say, for any man to marry on. So, after
a silence of two years on that subject, he reopened that most
hazardous question to Mlle. Adele Fauquier, riding down to Meade
d'Or, her father's plantation. Her answer was the same that it had
been any time during the last ten years: "First find my brother,
Monsieur Charles."

This time he had stood before her, perhaps discouraged by a love
so long and hopeless, being dependent upon a contingency so
unreasonable, and demanded to be told in simple words whether she
loved him or no.

Adele looked at him steadily out of her gray eyes that betrayed no
secrets and answered, a little more softly:

"Grandemont, you have no right to ask that question unless you can
do what I ask of you. Either bring back brother Victor to us or the
proof that he died."

Somehow, though five times thus rejected, his heart was not so heavy
when he left. She had not denied that she loved. Upon what shallow
waters can the bark of passion remain afloat! Or, shall we play
the doctrinaire, and hint that at thirty-four the tides of life
are calmer and cognizant of many sources instead of but one--as at
four-and-twenty?

Victor Fauquier would never be found. In those early days of his
disappearance there was money to the Charles name, and Grandemont
had spent the dollars as if they were picayunes in trying to find
the lost youth. Even then he had had small hope of success, for the
Mississippi gives up a victim from its oily tangles only at the whim
of its malign will.

A thousand times had Grandemont conned in his mind the scene of
Victor's disappearance. And, at each time that Adele had set her
stubborn but pitiful alternative against his suit, still clearer it
repeated itself in his brain.

The boy had been the family favourite; daring, winning, reckless.
His unwise fancy had been captured by a girl on the plantation--the
daughter of an overseer. Victor's family was in ignorance of the
intrigue, as far as it had gone. To save them the inevitable
pain that his course