ad, as he mounted to his room.

"Culver, you certainly put your foot in it that time!" he muttered.
"How she froze at my suggestion! Has there been some passage of arms
between them? Apparently! But here am I, pondering over romances with
all this legal business staring me in the face!" His glance swept a
chaos of declarations, bills, affidavits and claims. "Confound the
musty old courthouse and the bustling Yankee lawyers who set such a
disturbing pace! There is no longer gentlemanly leisure in New
Orleans."

He seated himself with a sigh before a neglected brief. In the
distance the towers of the cathedral could be seen, reminding the
attorney of the adjacent halls of justice in the scraggy-looking
square, with its turmoil, its beggars, and apple women in the lobbies;
its ancient, offensive smell, its rickety stairs, its labyrinth of
passages and its Babel of tongues. Above him, however, the plaster
bust of Justinian, out of those blank, sightless eyes, continued the
contemplation of the garden as though turning from the complex
jurisprudence of the ancients and moderns to the simple existence of
butterflies and flowers.

CHAPTER II

ONLY A SHADOW

There is an aphorism to the effect that one can not spend and have;
also, a saying about the whirlwind, both of which in time came home to
the land baron. For several generations the Mauville family, bearing
one of the proudest names in Louisiana, had held marked prestige under
Spanish and French rule, while extensive plantations indicated the
commercial ascendency of the patroon's ancestors. The thrift of his
forefathers, however, passed lightly over Edward Mauville. Sent to
Paris by his mother, a widow, who could deny him nothing, in the
course of a few years he had squandered two plantations and several
hundred negroes. Her death placed him in undisputed possession of the
residue of the estate, when finding the exacting details of commerce
irksome, in a moment of weakness, he was induced to dispose of some of
his possessions to Yankee speculators who had come in with the flood
of northern energy. Most of the money thus realized he placed in loose
investments, while the remainder gradually disappeared in indulging
his pleasures.

At this critical stage in his fortunes--or misfortunes--the patroon's
legacy had seemed timely, and his trip to the North followed. But from
a swarm of creditors, to a nest of anti-renters, was out of the
frying-pan into the fire