promised, Grandemont strove to prevent it.
Omnipotent money smoothed the way. The overseer and his daughter
left, between a sunset and dawn, for an undesignated bourne.
Grandemont was confident that this stroke would bring the boy
to reason. He rode over to Meade d'Or to talk with him. The two
strolled out of the house and grounds, crossed the road, and,
mounting the levee, walked its broad path while they conversed.
A thunder-cloud was hanging, imminent, above, but, as yet, no
rain fell. At Grandemont's disclosure of his interference in the
clandestine romance, Victor attacked him, in a wild and sudden fury.
Grandemont, though of slight frame, possessed muscles of iron. He
caught the wrists amid a shower of blows descending upon him, bent
the lad backward and stretched him upon the levee path. In a little
while the gust of passion was spent, and he was allowed to rise.
Calm now, but a powder mine where he had been but a whiff of the
tantrums, Victor extended his hand toward the dwelling house of
Meade d'Or.

"You and they," he cried, "have conspired to destroy my happiness.
None of you shall ever look upon my face again."

Turning, he ran swiftly down the levee, disappearing in the
darkness. Grandemont followed as well as he could, calling to
him, but in vain. For longer than an hour he pursued the search.
Descending the side of the levee, he penetrated the rank density of
weeds and willows that undergrew the trees until the river's edge,
shouting Victor's name. There was never an answer, though once he
thought he heard a bubbling scream from the dun waters sliding past.
Then the storm broke, and he returned to the house drenched and
dejected.

There he explained the boy's absence sufficiently, he thought, not
speaking of the tangle that had led to it, for he hoped that Victor
would return as soon as his anger had cooled. Afterward, when the
threat was made good and they saw his face no more, he found it
difficult to alter his explanations of that night, and there clung a
certain mystery to the boy's reasons for vanishing as well as to the
manner of it.

It was on that night that Grandemont first perceived a new and
singular expression in Adele's eyes whenever she looked at him. And
through the years following that expression was always there. He
could not read it, for it was born of a thought she would never
otherwise reveal.

Perhaps, if he had known that Adele had stood at the gate on that
unlucky night, w