Toward daylight the document was finished. Two black seals were placed at the last page, then the whole was folded up and carefully sealed. Weary and haggard was Daniel Clark, as he arose from his task; the bed stood in a corner of the chamber, cool and inviting, but he approached it not. With a heavy and wavering step, he reached the open window, and folding his arms upon the sill, turned his face to the soft night air, with a faint groan, and thus he remained till morning. The next day, Daniel Clark rode into the city, and was closeted with several of his old and intimate friends. In the house of one of these friends the others met by appointment, and there Daniel Clark read his last will and testament, making his child, Myra Clark, the heiress to his vast possessions, and there he solemnly declared his marriage with Zulima, that child’s mother. After this he sat down in the presence of his friends and chosen executors, and placed his signature to the will that his own hands had written. When Mr. Clark left them that day, his friends observed that the hand with which he clasped theirs was burning, and that his eyes looked heavy and swollen. They remarked, too, that he had never once smiled during the whole interview; but the occasion was a solemn one, and so they merely gave these things a passing thought, deeming them but the result of some undue excitement. At nightfall Mr. Clark reached the dwelling of Ross. It had been Zulima’s residence, and he yearned to lie down in the room that she had occupied, and to press the same pillow that she had wept upon. All the deep tenderness of his early love for that wronged woman came back to him with a knowledge of her blamelessness. Pride, the great sin of his nature, had been prostrated with the knowledge that he, with all his haughty self-reliance, all his splendor of intellect, had been influenced by base and ungrateful men to wrong the being dearest to him in life. All the manifestation of displeasure that he displayed toward Ross was a desire to avoid his presence, but even that awoke the ever-vigilant suspicion of the man. He had placed menial spies on the steps of Zulima, but in hunting down the sterner game Ross played the spy himself. The plantation which Ross occupied was the property of his patron, and in the dwelling Mr. Clark had always kept his own separate apartments. On returning home that night he entered a little library belonging to these apartments, and opening an escritoir had taken from thence an ebony box, in which were his most valuable papers. After placing the will therein he had carefully locked the escritoir and the room before retiring to his chamber for the night.