From that night, for many years, Edmund Roath disappeared as completely from the sight and search of all who had known him, as if the train wherein he sat had suddenly flung itself headlong from that narrow causeway, and those deep, silent, star-mirroring waters, closing above him, had steadfastly refused to give up their dead. In brief space of time, his very name, as well as the circumstances that had made it notorious, was forgotten by those who had been most diligent in passing it from mouth to mouth. Seldom was it recalled even by the few who had known him best, and had yielded the heartiest admiration to his rare intellectual gifts. Having never taken any real hold of any human heart, it was but natural that he should pass behind the first intervening cloud, and leave no vacancy. Did he thereby escape the worst consequences of his sin? PART FIRST. A WAY THAT SEEMETH RIGHT. I. "PROVERBS, AND THE INTERPRETATION." The road was straight, level, and monotonous. It seemed to stretch on for miles, walled in, on either hand, by the rank and profuse foliage of the South. Great cotton woods and water-oaks, walnuts, cypresses, larches, and junipers, stood side by side, with their brawny arms interlaced, and their trunks hidden in a dense and varied undergrowth; while jessamines and wild grapevines climbed up to meet the sunshine at their tops, and pendent moss hung their boughs with swaying drapery of gray-green leaves and filaments. What lay beyond these walls of verdure was only to be guessed at from occasional and indistinct glimpses. Here, a transient view of corn or vegetable rows, and a sound of voices, gave token of the vicinity of a small plantation or market garden. There, a scarcity of deciduous trees and a predominance of evergreens, a more lush and succulent character of undergrowth, and a dark gleam of stagnant water, betrayed the proximity of an extensive morass. Frequently, the eye lost itself in the complicated vistas of thick pine-barrens, stretching far away to right and left. And, ever and anon, a sudden break in the long line of verdure, and the sight of a diverging wheel-track, quickly lost amid overhanging boughs, served to show in what direction some large rice or cotton estate lay hidden in the circumjacent forest.