“What am de meaning ob all dis? What can de missus be about?” she muttered, casting down the raiment that had excited her distrust. The candle almost burned out, the drops of wax on the table, torn fragments of paper on the floor, were new objects of comment. The torn paper was all written upon, and had been gathered up in a grasp and wrenched asunder. The pieces were large, and might be easily combined. The negress could not read, but, with the quick cunning of her race, she saw that something unusual had happened, with which these fragments were connected, so gathering the papers in her apron, she bore them to her master, whose spy she was. It was the noise that Louisa made going out which aroused Zulima from her wretched vision. The young creature started up, thanking God that it was but a dream. In moving about the room, she approached a window opening upon the garden just in time to see Ross follow her woman, Louisa, into the little slave-dwelling which we described in our last chapter. Zulima lingered by the window. It was half an hour before Ross came forth again; he was followed by the slave woman, and stood conversing with her some time in one of the retired walks. Soon after, the young man who had been Ross’s companion from the city the previous day came up, and Louisa seemed to be dismissed. Still the two men conversed earnestly together, and, after a time, slowly retired into the slave-dwelling. Since the previous day Zulima had grown suspicious, and she remarked all these movements with keen interest. Well she might, for that day and hour, in the low slave-dwelling, was written a letter destined to cast black trouble upon her whole life. There, two fiends, fashioned like men, sat down and concocted a foul slander against that innocent young woman which was to cling around her for years, and which her full strength might struggle against in vain. The very mail which carried out Zulima’s passionate and tender epistle to her husband, bore also a wicked slander framed by these two base men. The pleading words, the endearing expressions, that she had folded up fresh from her innermost soul, that he might know how truly she loved him, went jostling side by side with the fiendish assertion that she, Zulima Clark, had been unfaithful to his love. And these two letters reached the husband in one package lying close to each other. _He read the slander first._ Zulima waited, but no answer ever came to her letter. Week after week she lived upon that painful hope which hangs upon the morrow, and still hope mocked her. Then she grew desperate. One day, when Ross came back from the city empty-handed as usual, Zulima had left his house with the avowed intention of seeking her husband in the North. “Let her go,” said the fiend, coolly folding the letter she had left behind. “The mail travels faster than she can; my pretty bird shall find all things prepared for her coming.”