away!" she threw
herself upon the floor, tearing madly at her hair. And so ended the
mystery of Beau Rivage.

There was silence a moment in Cram's pretty parlor when the captain had
finished his story. Waring was the first to speak:

"There is one point I wish they'd clear up."

"What's that?" said Cram.

"Who's got Merton's watch?"

"Oh, by Jove! I quite forgot. It's all right, Waring. Anatole's place
was 'pulled' last night, and he had her valuables all done up in a box.
'To pay for his boat,' he said."

* * * * *

A quarter of a century has passed away since the scarlet plumes of Light
Battery "X" were last seen dancing along the levee below New Orleans.
Beau Rivage, old and moss-grown at the close of the war, fell into rapid
decline after the tragedy of that April night. Heavily mortgaged, the
property passed into other hands, but for years never found a tenant.
Far and near the negroes spoke of the homestead as haunted, and none of
their race could be induced to set foot within its gates. One night the
sentry at the guard-house saw sudden light on the westward sky, and then
a column of flame. Again the fire-alarm resounded among the echoing
walls of the barracks; but when the soldiers reached the scene, a
seething ruin was all that was left of the old Southern home. Somebody
sent Cram a marked copy of a New Orleans paper, and in their cosey
quarters at Fort Hamilton the captain read it aloud to his devoted Nell:
"The old house has been vacant, an object of almost superstitious dread
to the neighborhood," said the _Times_, "ever since the tragic death of
Armand Lascelles in the spring of 1868. In police annals the affair was
remarkable because of the extraordinary chain of circumstantial evidence
which for a time seemed to fasten the murder upon an officer of the army
then stationed at Jackson Barracks, but whose innocence was triumphantly
established. Madame Lascelles, it is understood, is now educating her
daughter in Paris, whither she removed immediately after her marriage a
few months ago to Captain Philippe Lascelles, formerly of the
Confederate army, a younger brother of her first husband."

"Well," said Cram, "I'll have to send that to Waring. They're in Vienna
by this time, I suppose. Look here, Nell; how was it that when we
fellows were fretting about Waring's attentions to Madame, you should
have been so serenely superior to it all, even when, as I know, the
stori