, and report as to whether
any one of them would be suitable for a residence should the owner
desire to visit the city. If none should prove so, Louise Trouvelot,
who comprehended entirely the needs of the Marquise, was further
commissioned to look up such a residence with a view to purchase, and
communicate with the Marquise and with her American lawyers, who were
to give assistance to Louise Trouvelot in several business matters,
especially relating to her quest.

CHAPTER XI.

ON THE SALKAHATCHIE.

Scarce a leaf quivered on the branches of the magnolias, or a tress of
gray-green moss on the cypress boughs. All the world of the
Salkahatchie was wrapped in siesta. The white clouds drifting on
palest turquoise were the only moving things except the water flowing
beneath, and its soft swish against the gunnels of the floating wharf
made the only sound.

The plantation home of Loringwood, facing the river, and reached
through the avenue of enormous live oaks, looked an enchanted palace
touched with the wand of silence.

From the wide stone steps to the wide galleries, with their fluted
pillars, not a murmur but the winged insects droning in the tangled
grasses, for the wild luxuriance of rose tree and japonica, of lawn
and crape myrtle, betrayed a lack of pruning knives in the immediate
season past; and to the south, where the rice fields had reached acre
beyond acre towards the swamps, there were now scattered patches of
feathering young pine, creeping everywhere not forbidden to it by the
hand of man.

Spring time and summer time, for almost a century, had been lived
through under its sloping, square, dormer-windowed roof. But all the
blue sky and brilliant sunshine above could not save it from a
suggestion of autumn, and the shadows lengthening along the river were
in perfect keeping with the entire picture--a picture of perpetual
afternoon.

"Row-lock," "Row-lock," sounded the dip and click of paddles, as a
boat swept close to the western bank, where the shadows fell. Two
Afro-Americans bent in rhythmic motion--bronze human machines, whose
bared arms showed nothing of effort as they sent the boat cutting
through the still water.

A middle-aged woman in a voluminous lavender lawn and carrying a
parasol of plaid silk-green, with faded pink bars, sat in the after
part of the boat, while a slight brown-haired girl just in front
amused herself by catching at branches of willows as they passed.

"Evilen