The apartment was very pleasant. The inner shutters of wire gauze, that were closed against the mosquitoes, did not exclude the fresh and fragrant evening breeze that fanned the room. The elegant tea-table stood in the midst, and the whole was illumined by light subdued through shades of ground glass—not figured—but plain, and diffusing a soft, clear, even radiance. They sat down to the table, and coffee and tea were served by waiters from the sideboard. To dispel the last shades of suspicion and discontent from the mind of Mr. Sutherland, Mrs. Vivian remarked: “We are to have Mr. Mark Sutherland home in a very few days, if I understand aright. _N’est ce pas, chere Indie?_” Miss Sutherland only bowed, and the conversation turned upon their approaching voyage to Europe. CHAPTER IV. MRS. SUTHERLAND. On her cheek the autumn flush Deeply ripens; such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn. Round her eyes her tresses lay— Which are blackest, none can say; But long lashes veil a light That had else been all too bright.—_Hood._ On the opposite side of the Pearl from Cashmere, and a little further down the river, and back from its banks, in a small vale embosomed in hills, was Silentshades, the home of Mark Sutherland. The homestead was the same that had been built by his father, upon first laying out the plantation. The house was very modest and unpretending—a moderate-sized, oblong building of two stories, painted light brown, with green shutters, and with piazzas surrounding both floors. The house was shaded and darkened by catalpa trees clustering thick about it and overhanging the roof. The pillars of the piazzas were thickly twined with running vines, that, branching and interlacing, formed a beautiful _treillage_ of foliage and flowers. Doors from this piazza admitted directly into the rooms upon the first floor. In the right-hand front room, opening upon two sides into the piazza, upon the next evening after the events related in the last chapter, sat Mrs. Sutherland. She was a medium-sized, full-formed brunette, of perhaps forty years of age; yet so perfect was her physical organization, and so well regulated her moral nature, so even, calm, and blameless had been the tenor of her life, that now, she was a specimen—not, certainly, of youthful beauty—but of a rarer kind of matured and perfected matronly beauty. Her style was noble and simple. Her rich, abundant hair of glossy black, with purplish light, was plainly divided above a broad forehead, and laying down upon the temples in heavy looped bands, was carried behind and twisted into a thick, rich coil, and wound round and round into a large knot fastened with pins; there were no combs, curls, ribbons, or fripperies of any sort, to mar the simple, grand beauty of the head.