and who was to
return to Lesdernier after the interval of a week.

In the ardor of my impulse, I could not slight an opportunity of so soon
receiving a reply to my somewhat startling and, I felt now,
too-long-delayed communication, and thus testing my lover's trust and
confidence in me. When Gregory returned to Beauseincourt, he assured me
he had delivered my letter punctually (I never doubted this, for he knew
the man he had to deal with), adding, carelessly, that it was well
Wentworth had said he would write soon, as he had been unfortunate
enough to lose the hastily-pencilled reply, with his own pocket-book, at
the Lenoir Landing, where both were food for fishes.

My disappointment was extreme, and many weeks of constrained silence
passed before I received the promised letter from Captain Wentworth--so
gloomy, so incomprehensible, so portentous, that it filled me with
despair. In this letter he spoke of obstacles between us--in which blood
bore part--of the wreck of all earthly happiness for him--perchance for
me. Yet he conjured me to be calm and patient, as he could not be, and
alluded to my silence as conclusive of his misery. He referred
frequently to the letter he had intrusted to the care of Gregory as
explanatory of all that might otherwise seem inexplicable--that letter
at rest beneath the dark waters of the Bayou Noir--if--if, indeed! But
no! not even of Gregory could I harbor on slight grounds such
suspicions. "Let the devil himself have the full benefit of--doubt!"
says Rabelais. I wrote to Wentworth that I would come and make all
plain, as he desired, in June.

Suffering severely myself, I saw clouds gathering and rising around a
happy household that for a time drew me from the depths of my own
affliction in the vain effort to solace their woes.

Father and son and infant in one house, wife and imbecile daughter in
another, at last fell at one dread swoop. To dishonor was added the
crime of suicide, and poverty and breaking hearts were there, for the
heritage of Beauseincourt was, by reason of debt and mismanagement, to
pass, after the death of its master, into strange hands--the cruel hands
of creditors!

Walter La Vigne was dead, and the succession of Bellevue passed over the
daughters of the house, to vest in a distant kinsman. He came, toward
the last of my stay, to take his own; and, unexpectedly, George Gaston,
the playmate of my childhood, the lover of my first youth, stood before
me in the