In his inexorable view of the sanctity of his promise Colonel Kenwynton had no impulse to confide the details of the revelation he had received or to take counsel thereon. Still, he could but look with an accession of interest at Adrian Ducie when he met him at the breakfast table, the passengers of the Cherokee Rose dallying over the meal, prolonging it to the utmost in the dearth of other interest or occupation.

Although Ducie seemed to have mustered the philosophy to ignore the serious aspects of this most irksome and dolorous detention, it had darkened all the horizon to Floyd-Rosney’s exacting and censorious mood. “I can’t imagine, Captain, how you should not have been on the lookout for the formation of an obstruction capable of grounding the boat,” was his cheerful matutinal greeting.

“Oh, Miss Dean says he knew it was there all the time, and only wished to entertain us,” his wife interposed, with a view of toning down her lord’s displeasure, but her sarcastic chin was in the air, and her clipped, quick enunciation gave token only of one of her ironic pleasantries.

“Well, I intend to eat him out of house and home while I am about it,” said Ducie, with an affectation of roughness. “This table is not run À la carte. You can’t charge more than the passage-money, Captain, no matter how long we abide with you in this pleasance of a sand-bar—and I really think, waiter, I can get away with the other wing of that fried chicken.”

“You think you can get away; can you?” Mrs. Floyd-Rosney fleered.

The queer little roughness he affected was incongruous with the delicate elegance of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s presence. The polish of his own appearance and ordinary manner warranted it as little, and the contrariety of his mental attitude was like that of a bad child “showing off” in the reverse of expectation or desire. Between the heavy sulking of her husband in the troublous contretemps of the detention of the boat, and the peculiar tone that Adrian Ducie had taken, in which, however, offense was at once untenable and inexplicable, it might seem that Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had much ado to preserve her airy placidity and maintain the poise of the delicate irony of her manner. This became more practicable when Ducie’s attention was diverted to a little girl of twelve who had boarded the packet with her father at the landing of a fashionable suburban school some distance up the river, evidently designing to spend the week-end at home. She was a bouncing little girl, with liquid black eyes, and dark red hair, long and abundant, plaited on either side of her head and tied up with black ribbon bows of preposterously wide loops. While she was as noisy and as active as a boy, she was evidently constantly beset with the realization that her lot in life was of feminine restrictions, and miserably repented of every alert caper. Her memory, however, was short, as short, one might say, as her very abbreviated skirts, and the monition of the staid gait, appropriate to her sex, always struck her after the fantastic gallopade or muscular skip on her long, handsome, black-stockinged legs, and never by any chance earlier. She had a most Briarean and centipedal consciousness in Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s presence, which she instinctively appraised as critical, and she was covered with confusion as she came flustering out of her stateroom to the breakfast table to realize that she had banged the door behind her. By way of disposing of one superfluous foot at least she crooked her leg deftly at the knee, placed its foot in the chair and sat down upon it, turning scarlet as she did so, realizing all too late that the maneuver was perfectly obvious, and wondering what Mrs. Floyd-Rosney must think of a girl who sat on her foot. For the opinion of the score of other persons at the tables she had not a thought or a care, doubtless relying on their good nature to condone the attitude, curiously affected and prized by persons of her age and sex. An agile twist had got the foot down to the floor again, and now with restored composure and rebounding spirits her gushing loquacity was reasserted, and she was exchanging matutinal greetings with her traveling companions; her father, a tall, lean, quiet man, who had marked her entrance with raised eyebrows and a concerned air, having resumed his talk on the tariff with his next neighbor at table.

“Have compassion on our dullness, Miss Marjorie,” said Adrian Ducie, suavely smiling at her from across the board. In his contrariety he seemed to have divined Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s covert disapproval and made a point of according his own favor. Marjorie’s heart, however, was in no danger from his fascinations. To her he seemed a man well advanced in years, quite an old bachelor, indeed. “Tell us your dreams.”

“Dreams? oh, mercy!” How often had she been warned against rising inflections and interjections? “My dreams are all mixed up. I don’t know now what they were.”

“I will disentangle them for you,” he said, blandly; then in parenthesis to the waiter, “Give the cook my compliments and tell him to send up another omelette, which I will share with Miss Ashley.”

“Oh, I don’t like eggs,” Marjorie blurted out, then stopped short. How often had she been admonished never to say at table that she disliked any article of diet. Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, she was sure, must have noticed that lapse.

“Then I will eat it all by myself—mark me now, Captain! While awaiting its construction I will tell your dreams, and interpret their mystery.”

“Oh, oh,” gurgled Marjorie. What a nice old man was this Mr. Adrian Ducie! Her blithe young eyes were liquid and brilliant with expectation.

“You dreamed that you and I went hunting, with some others who don’t matter and who shall be nameless,” he glanced slightingly up and down the row of passengers at the table. “We went ashore in the yawl, and I borrowed the Captain’s rifle, and——”

“No, you didn’t,” said the Captain, from the next table, “for I haven’t got one.”

“You don’t mean it?” said Ducie, stopping short. “Then what would become of us if pirates should board this gallant craft of ours? Depend wholly on the pistol pockets of the passengers?”

“Oh, oh, Mr. Ducie,” cried Marjorie, quite losing her hold on herself, “you are so funny!”

“Thank you, oh, very much, I can be funnier than that when I try.”

Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s unseeing eyes perceived no interest apparently in this conversation. Now and then, with an absorbed air, she recurred to her tea and toast as if naught were going forward, while her husband ate his breakfast as silently and with as much gruff concentration as a hound with a bone.

Their persistent expression of a lack of interest seemed to stimulate Mr. Ducie to a further absorption of the attention of the company. “Are there really no shot-guns, no fowling-pieces aboard, nothing to shoot with deadlier than the darts of Miss Marjorie’s bright eyes?”

“Oh, oh,” she squealed, enchanted at this turn, and laid down her knife and fork to put her hands before her lips apparently to suppress a series of similar shrillnesses, for this old man’s funniness was of a most captivating order.

“I notice that there is a swamper’s cabin over there on the bank; I’ll bet he has got a rifle; but what is the nearest plantation house, Captain? Mansion, I should say,” he corrected the phrase with the satiric flout of the younger generation at the mannerisms of yore.

The Captain seemed to resent it. “You may very safely call it a ‘mansion,’ sir, it has twenty-five rooms, exclusive of ball-room, billiard-room, picture-gallery, and the domestic offices, kitchen, laundry, dairy, and quarters for servants, and so forth. The Duciehurst plantation-house is the nearest mansion. It is really a ruin, now, and uninhabited, I suppose, but it was good enough in its day.”

A sudden portentous gravity smote the countenance of Adrian Ducie. Although the risible muscles and ligaments still held the laughing contour, all the mirth was gone out of it. His face was as if stricken into stone, as if he had suddenly beheld the Gorgon Head of trouble. The change was so marked, so momentous, that Colonel Kenwynton, forgetting for the moment whence came the association of ideas, suddenly asked:

“You have the same name as the former owner, Mr. Ducie, though I suppose you don’t hold the title to the mansion?”

“Oh, I hold the title fast enough,” replied Ducie, with his wonted off-hand manner, “though it’s like my ‘title to a mansion in the skies,’ I can’t read it clear.”

Floyd-Rosney’s mood was already lowering enough, but for some reason, not immediately apparent, his averse discontent was fomented by the change of the subject. He paused with his tea-cup poised in his hand. His deep voice weighed more heavily than usual on the silence.

“It seems to me a mis-statement to say that you have a title to the property,—a title is a right. There are certainly some forty years’ adverse possession against any outstanding claim, of which I have never heard.”

Ducie was eyeing Floyd-Rosney with a look at once affronted and amazed. “And where do you derive your information as to my title to Duciehurst?”

“I have no information as to your title to Duciehurst, which is the reason that I could not remain silent when such title was asserted, though the discussion cannot be edifying to this goodly company.” He waved his hand at the rows of breakfasting passengers with an unmirthful smile and his courtesy was so perfunctory as obviously to have no root. “The title is mine, it comes to me within the year from the will of my Uncle Horace Carriton, who held it for forty years. But,” with his sour, condescending smile at the company, “the courts and not the breakfast table are the proper place to assert a right that is not barred by the lapse of time.”

“The remedy may be barred, but not the right,” Ducie retorted angrily.

Captain Disnett’s voice sounded with pacifying intonations. He did not seek to change the subject but to steer it clear of breakers. “I never could understand why Mr. Carriton let the old mansion go to wreck and ruin, fine old place as there is on the river. Though he rented out the lands the house has always remained untenanted.”

Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s dignity was enhanced by the composure which he found it possible to maintain in this nettling discussion. “The house was much injured by the occupancy of guerillas and military marauders during the Civil War,” he rejoined. “After it came into the possession of my uncle, when peace was restored, it was left vacant from necessity. My uncle, who was a non-resident,—lived in Tennessee,—would not cut up the plantation into small holdings; many tenants make much mischief, so he preferred to lease the entire place to some man of moderate means for a term of years, as no person of fortune appeared as a purchaser of the house, which it would cost largely to restore. None of the successive lessees was able or willing to furnish or maintain the mansion in a style suitable to its pretensions, yet they were too proud to live in a corner of it like a mouse in a hole. Such a man would prefer to live in a neighboring villa or cottage while farming the lands as better suited to his comfort and credit than that vacant wilderness of architecture.”

“Strange visitors it must have at odd times,” meditated the Captain. “Once in a while in our runs I have seen lights flitting about there at night, quite distinct from the pilot-house. And in wintry weather a gleam shows far over the snow.”

“Tramps, gipsies, river-pirates, I suppose,” suggested Colonel Kenwynton.

Ducie was glowering down at his spoon as he turned it aimlessly in his empty cup, a deep red flush on his cheek and his eyes on fire.

“Yes, yes. There is a tradition of hidden treasure at Duciehurst, one of the wild riverside stories as old as the hills,” said the Captain, “and I suppose the water-rats, and the shanty-boaters, and the river-pirates all take turns in hunting for it when fuel and shelter get scarce, and the pot boils slow, and work goes hard with the lazy cattle.”

For one moment Colonel Kenwynton’s head was in a whirl. Had he dreamed this thing, this story of family jewels and important papers stowed in a knapsack and hidden on Duciehurst plantation? So sudden was the confirmation of the war-time legend, so hard it came on the revelation of last night in the turbulent elements on the verge of the sand-bar that it scarcely seemed fact. He had not had time to think it over, to canvass the strange chance in his mind. Treherne had declared that for forty years he had been an inmate of an insane asylum. Without analyzing his own mental processes Colonel Kenwynton was aware that he had taken it for granted that the story was a vain fabrication of half-distraught faculties, an illusion, a part of the unreasoning adventure that had summoned him forth from his bed in the midnight to stand knee-deep in the marsh to hear a recital of baffled rights and hidden treasure. In all charity and candor he had begun to wonder that Hugh Treherne should find himself now beyond the bounds of detention. In these corroborative developments, however, his opinion veered and he made a plunge at further elucidation of the mystery.

“Mr. Ducie, I should be glad to know what relation you are to Lieutenant Archibald Ducie, who died of typhoid in a hospital in Vicksburg during the war?”

Ducie answered in a single word, “Nephew.”

“Then you are George Blewitt Ducie’s grandson.”

“Grandson,” monosyllabic as before.

The old man thought himself a strategist of deep, elusive craft. For the sake of his friend, Captain Treherne, and his plaintive disability; for the sake of the implied trust accepted in the fact that he had received this confidence, he must seek to know the truth while he screened the motive. “Well, since these old world clavers are mighty interesting to an ancient fossil such as I am—I must look backward having, you know, no future in view,—wasn’t there some talk of a lost document, a deed of trust missing, mislaid,—what was it about—a Duciehurst mortgage?”

“A release of a mortgage,” replied Ducie, his words coming with the impetus and fury of hot shot. “The lost paper was a release of a mortgage, a quit-claim, signed and witnessed, but not registered. There were no facilities at the time to record legal papers, not a court nor a clerk’s office open in the country, which was filled with contending armies.”

Mr. Floyd-Rosney had finished his breakfast and seemed about to rise. The vexation of this discussion was beyond endurance to a proud and pompous man. But it was not his temperament to give back one inch. He stood his ground and presently he began to affect indifference to the situation, placing an elbow on the table and looking with his imperious composure first at one speaker and then at the other. He was not so absorbed, however, that he did not note how his wife loitered over the waffles before her, spinning out the details of the meal that no point of the conversation might escape her.

“I remember now, I remember,” said Colonel Kenwynton, nodding his white head. “It was claimed that the mortgage was lifted, the debt being paid in gold, and that a formal release was executed here in Mississippi and delivered with the original paper, though not noted in the instrument of registration.”

“There being no courts in operation,” interpolated Ducie, obviously as restive as a fiery horse.

“And by reason of the intervention of the Federal lines and the sudden deaths of the two principals to the transaction the promissory notes, thus secured on the plantation, were not returned to the maker, but remained in Tennessee, where Mr. Carroll Carriton had deposited them in a bank for safekeeping.”

“Is this a fairy-story, Colonel Kenwynton?” sneered Floyd-Rosney, his patience wearing thin under the strain upon it, and beginning to deprecate and doubt the effect on his wife.

“No, it is a story of the evil genii,” said Ducie, significantly.

“You mean War and Confusion, and Loss,” said Floyd-Rosney, in bland interpretation, and apparently in excellent temper. “They are, indeed, the evil genii. But you will please to observe, Colonel Kenwynton, that the executors of the mortgagee, Mr. Carroll Carriton, could not accept this unsupported representation of an executed release of the mortgage. The executors had the registered mortgage, with no marginal notation of its satisfaction, and they had the promissory notes. They sued the estate of George Blewitt Ducie on the promissory notes and foreclosed on Duciehurst.”

“I remember, I remember,” said Colonel Kenwynton, “and although at the period when the mortgage was made it was for a sum inconsiderable in comparison with the value of the property Duciehurst went under the hammer in the collapsed financial conditions subsequent to the war for less than the amount of the original indebtedness, plantations being a drug on the market, and the executors of the mortgagee bought it in for the Carriton estate.”

“The executors proceeded throughout under the sanction of the court,” said Floyd-Rosney. “Of course, I would have the utmost sensitiveness to the position of an interloper or usurper, but in this instance there can be no such suggestion. No papers could be produced by the defendant, and a wild legend of the loss of such documents could not withstand the scrutiny of even the least cautious and strict chancellor. The fact that Carroll Carriton happened to be in Mississippi at that time and that George Blewitt Ducie was known to have aggregated a considerable sum in gold by a successful blockade-running scheme of selling cotton in Liverpool was dwelt upon by the counsel for the Ducie heir as corroborative evidence that the two principals to the transaction met expressly to lift the incumbrance, but this contention was not admitted by the court.”

He paused for a moment. Then he turned directly upon Ducie. “While I should be sorry, Mr. Ducie, if you should grudge me my rightful holding, I observe that your brother does not share your view. He acquiesced in the existing status by renting certain of these lands while in my uncle’s possession before I succeeded under the will.”

“By no means, by no means,” cried Ducie, furiously. “He is no tenant of yours. He only purchased the standing crop of cotton from your uncle’s tenant, who was obliged to leave the country for a time—shot a man. But, as I understand it, you could not plead that acquiescence, even if it existed, in the event that the release could be found,—take advantage of your own tort in the foreclosure of a mortgage duly paid.”

“Oh, if you talk of ‘torts,’ this ‘knowledge is too excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it.’” Floyd-Rosney retorted, lightly.

His wife still held her fork in her hand, but he significantly placed her finger-bowl beside her plate. Then he rose. “Any rights that you can prove to my estate of Duciehurst, Mr. Ducie, will be gladly conceded by me. Kindly remember that, if you please.”

His wife was constrained to rise and he stood aside with a bow to let her pass first down the restricted space between the tables and the wall. They were out on the guards when she lifted her eyes to his and laid her hand on his arm.

“Why did you never tell me that the property which has lately come to you really belongs to the Ducies?”

He stared down at her, too astonished to be angry.

“Why? Because it is a lie. The Ducies have not a vestige of a right to it.”

“Oh, no, no. The Ducies would never seek to maintain a lie. Only they can’t substantiate their claim on account of the disastrous chances of war.”

She put her hands before her face and shook her head. When she looked up again there were vague blue circles beneath her eyes. The nervous stress of the incident and some unformulated association with the idea were obviously bearing on her heavily.

“It seems to me that we ought not to keep it,” she faltered.

“Keep it!” he thundered. “Why, we, that is our predecessors, have owned it for the last forty years, without a question. Why, Paula, are you crazy? The whole affair went through the courts forty years ago. ‘Ought not to keep it!’ The Ducie heir, this man’s father, who was then a minor, had not a scrap of paper nor one material witness, only the general understanding in the country that as Carroll Carriton happened to be in Mississippi at the time, and George Blewitt Ducie had a lot of specie from running his cotton through the blockade to England, he paid off the mortgage in gold. But that was mere hearsay, chiefly rumor of the gabble of the men who, it was claimed, had witnessed the execution of the quit-claim, and who took occasion to die immediately thereafter.”

“There is some inherent coercive evidence, to my mind, of the truth of those circumstances,” she declared. “It is too hard that the Ducies should have paid the money owed on the mortgage and then lose the place by foreclosure, and, oh, for less than the amount of the original debt.”

“But, Paula, can’t you see there is not a grain of proof that they ever paid the money? How, when, where? We held the promissory notes and the registered deed of trust and the court did not even take the matter under advisement.”

“But you know the confusion of the times,—no courts of record, no mail facilities or means of communication.”

“Much exaggerated, I believe. But at all events we had the promissory notes and the registered mortgage and they had their cock-and-bull story.”

“Oh, I should like to give it back,—it would be so noble of you. I cannot bear that we should own what the Ducies claim is theirs, and I feel sure that if it is not theirs in law it is by every moral sanction. And for such a poor price!—to lose the whole estate for the little amount, comparatively, of the debt! It is too sharp a bargain for us. How much was the amount for which the executors bought it in?”

His face changed and he did not answer. It had not been a pleasant morning, and his imperious temper had been greatly strained. “I remember,” he said, satirically, losing his self-control at last, “that you once entertained a tender interest in one of these Messieurs Ducie. I must say that I did not expect it to last so long or to go so far,—to propose to denude me of my very own, one of the finest properties in Mississippi, and vest him with it!”

Her face flushed. Her eyes flashed. “You have broken your promise! You have broken your promise!” She looked so vehement, so affronted, so earnest, that her anger tamed him for a moment.

“It was inadvertent, dear. The circumstances forced it.”

“It was solemnly agreed between us that we would never mention this man, never remember that he existed. When I promised to marry you I told you frankly that I had been engaged to him, and had never a thought, a hope, a wish, but that I might marry him, until I met you.”

“I know, dear, I remember.” His warm hand closed down on her trembling fingers that she had laid on the railing of the guards as if for support.

“It is a matter of pride with me. I have no idea that I should feel so about it if it were any one else. But, of course, I know that he must reproach me for my duplicity, my inconstancy—”

“But you do not reproach yourself,” with a quick, searching glance.

“No, no, I was not inconstant. Only then I had not met you. But I have caused him unhappiness, and a sort of humiliation among his friends, who consider that I threw him over at the last minute, and I cannot bear to own anything that he accounts his. I don’t want his land. I don’t want his house. I wish you would deed it all back to him.”

“You tiresome little dunce!” he exclaimed, laughing. “It is one of the largest plantations in acreage, cleared and tillable, in Mississippi, and I really should not like to say how much it is worth, especially now with the price of cotton on the bounce. People would think I was crazy if I did such a mad thing as to deed it back. I should be unfitted for any part in the business world. No one would trust me for a moment. And apart from my own interest, consider our son. What would he think of me, of you, when he comes to man’s estate, if we should alienate for a whim that fine property, of which he might one day stand in dire need. Change is the order of the times. Edward Floyd-Rosney, Junior, may not have a walk over the course as his father did.”

“But, Edward, we are rich—”

“And so would the Ducies be, by hook or by crook, if they knew what is comfortable.” He laughed prosperously. He was tired of the subject, and was turning away as he drew forth his cigar-case. He was good to himself, and fostered his taste for personal luxury, even in every minute manner that would not be ridiculously obtrusive as against the canons of good taste. The ring on the third finger of his left hand might seem, to the casual glance of the uninitiated, the ordinary seal so much affected, but a connoisseur would discern in it a priceless intaglio. The match-box which he held as he walked away along the guards was of solid gold, richly chased. His clothes were the masterpieces of a London tailor of the first order, but so decorous and inconspicuous in their fine simplicity that but for their enhancement of his admirable figure and grace of movement their quality and cost might have passed unnoticed.

Paula looked after him with an intent and troubled gaze, her heart pulsing tumultuously, her brain on fire. It would never have been within her spiritual compass to make a conscious sacrifice of self for a point of ethics. She could not have relinquished aught that she craved, or that was significant in its effects. To own Duciehurst would make no item of difference in the luxury of their life,—to give it up could in no way reduce their consequence or splendor of appointment. To her the acquisition of a hundred thousand dollars, more or less, signified naught in an estate of millions. They were rich, they had every desire of luxury or ostentation gratified,—what would they have more? But that this prosperity should be fostered, aggrandized by the loss of the man whom she had causelessly jilted, wounded her pride. It was peculiarly lacerating to her sensibilities that her husband should own Randal Ducie’s ancestral estate, bought under the disastrous circumstances of a forced sale for a mere trifle of its value, and that she should be enriched by this almost thievish chance. She could not endure that it should be Randal Ducie at last from whom she should derive some part of the luxury which she had craved and for which she had bartered his love—that he should be bravely struggling on, bereft of his inheritance, in that sane and simple sphere to which she had looked back last night as another and a native world, from which she was exiled to this realm of alien and flamboyant splendor, that suddenly had grown strangely garish and bitter to the taste as she contemplated it. What, indeed, did it signify to her?—She had no part, no choice in dispensing her husband’s wealth. Everything was brought to her hand, regardless of her wish or volition, as if she were a puppet. Even her charities, her appropriate pose as a “lady bountiful,” were not spontaneous. “I think you had better subscribe two hundred dollars to the refurnishing of the Old Woman’s Home, Paula,—it is incumbent in your position,” he would say, or “I made a contribution of five hundred in your name to the Children’s Hospital,—it is expected that in your position you would do something.” Her position—this made the exaction, not charity, not humanity, not generosity. But for the mention in the local journals the institutions of the city would never have known the lavish hand of one of its wealthiest and most prominent citizens. The money would, doubtless, do good even bestowed in this spirit, but the gift had no blessing for the giver, and she felt no glow of gratulation. Indeed, it was not a gift,—it was a tax paid on her position. More than once when she had advocated a donation on her own initiative he had promptly negatived the idea. “No use in that,” he would declare, or the story of destitution and disaster was a “fake.” These instances were not calculated to illustrate her position. She could not endure that it should levy its tribute on Randal Ducie’s future, and she noted the significant fact that always hitherto in mentioning the recent acquisition under his kinsman’s will her husband had avoided the name of the estate which must have acquainted her with its former ownership.