nt.

After ransacking his pockets, turning them inside out, he comes to the
conclusion that the precious papers are lost.

It startles, and for a moment dismays him. Where are they? He must
have let them fall in his hasty retreat through the trees; or left them
by the dead body.

Shall he go back in search of them?

No--no--no! He does not dare to return upon that track. The forest
path is too sombre, too solitary, now. By the margin of the dank
lagoon, under the ghostly shadow of the cypresses, he might meet the
ghost of the man murdered!

And why should he go back? After all, there is no need; nothing in the
letter which can in any way compromise him. Why should he care to
recover it?

"It may go to the devil, her picture along! Let both rot where I
suppose I must have dropped them--in the mud, or among the palmettoes.
No matter where. But it does matter, my being under the magnolia at the
right time, to meet her. Then shall I learn my fate--know it, for
better, for worse. If the former, I'll continue to believe in the story
of Richard Plantagenet; if the latter, Richard Darke won't much care
what becomes of him."

So ending his strange soliloquy, with a corresponding cast upon his
countenance, the assassin rebuttons his coat--thrown open in search for
the missing papers. Then, flinging the double-barrelled fowling-piece--
the murder-gun--over his sinister shoulder, he strides off to keep an
appointment not made for him, but for the man he has murdered!

CHAPTER TEN.

THE EVE OF DEPARTURE.

The evil day has arrived; the ruin, foreseen, has fallen.

The mortgage deed, so long held in menace over the head of Archibald
Armstrong--suspended, as it were, by a thread, like the sword of
Damocles--is to be put into execution. Darke has demanded immediate
payment of the debt, coupled with threat of foreclosure.

The demand is a month old, the threat has been carried out, and the
foreclosure effected. The thread having been cut, the keen blade of
adversity has come down, severing the tie which attached Colonel
Armstrong to his property, as it to him. Yesterday, he was owner,
reputedly, of one of the finest plantations along the line of the
Mississippi river, an hundred able-bodied negroes hoeing cotton in his
fields, with fifty more picking it from the pod, and "ginning" the
staple clear of seed; to-day, he is but their owner in seeming, Ephraim
Darke being this in reality. And in another day