ing her dagger sleep in her bosom, and with an undefined
belief in imaginary resources, she had consented to join hands with her
giant hero before the priest; and when the wedding had come and gone
like a white sail, she was seized with a lasting, fierce despair. A wild
aggressiveness that had formerly characterized her glance in moments of
anger--moments which had grown more and more infrequent under the
softening influence of her Mademoiselle's nature--now came back
intensified, and blazed in her eye perpetually. Whatever her secret love
may have been in kind, its sinking beyond hope below the horizon had
left her fifty times the mutineer she had been before--the mutineer who
has nothing to lose.

"She loves her _candio_" said the negroes.

"Simple creatures!" said the overseer, who prided himself on his
discernment, "she loves nothing; she hates Agricola; it's a case of hate
at first sight--the strongest kind."

Both were partly right; her feelings were wonderfully knit to the
African; and she now dedicated herself to Agricola's ruin.

The senor, it has been said, endeavored to be happy; but now his heart
conceived and brought forth its first-born fear, sired by
superstition--the fear that he was bewitched. The negroes said that
Bras-Coupe had cursed the land. Morning after morning the master looked
out with apprehension toward the fields, until one night the worm came
upon the indigo, and between sunset and sunrise every green leaf had
been eaten up and there was nothing left for either insect or
apprehension to feed upon.

And then he said--and the echo came back from the Cannes Brulees--that
the very bottom culpability of this thing rested on the Grandissimes,
and specifically on their fugleman Agricola, through his putting the
hellish African upon him. Moreover, fever and death, to a degree unknown
before, fell upon his slaves. Those to whom life was spared--but to whom
strength did not return--wandered about the place like scarecrows,
looking for shelter, and made the very air dismal with the reiteration,
"_No' ouanga_ (we are bewitched), _Bras-Coupe fe moi des grigis_ (the
voudou's spells are on me)." The ripple of song was hushed and the
flowers fell upon the floor.

"I have heard an English maxim," wrote Colonel De Grapion to his
kinsman, "which I would recommend you to put into practice--'Fight the
devil with fire.'"

No, he would not recognize devils as belligerents.

But if Rome commissioned exor