The husband turned away; his limbs trembled, his eyes were blinded with moisture, and the weight of that little babe seemed to bend and sway his strong frame, as if he had been a reed. He looked back upon the mother. There she lay, the wet eyelids closed and quivering—her white lips pressed together, and so pale, that but for the agitation of her features she might have seemed stricken dead in the midst of her anguish. He returned to the couch. “Zulima, would you kiss the babe before it goes!” “I dare not—I dare not,” broke from those pale lips; then Zulima held back her sobs, for his footsteps were departing—a door closed—husband and child both were gone. Then the mother’s anguish broke forth, her arms were flung upward, her quivering hands clasped wildly together—a moment and they fell heavily upon the orange flowers that still littered the bed, crushing them in her utter insensibility. Then, while the young wife lay so pale and deathly there stole toward the bed that negro woman, who bent down till the bright Madras ’kerchief turbaning her forehead mingled with the chestnut tresses that lay scattered over the shoulder and bosom of the sufferer. She listened a moment, as if to make herself quite certain that what seemed so deathly was not death itself, and then glided from the chamber. The negress stole softly through the open hall, and into a spacious garden; a row of small white buildings stood at the farther extremity, gleaming in snowy patches through the vines and trees that embowered that portion of the garden. These were the slave-dwellings belonging to a rich plantation some three miles from New Orleans—belonging to the husband of Zulima, and occupied for a season by his bosom friend that the infancy of his child might be honorably sheltered. And here in a little whitewashed room of the slave dwelling this bosom friend was impatiently watching the approach of the female slave whom he had placed—a dark spy—in the bed-chamber of that helpless young wife. With his face close to one of the four panes of glass that admitted light to the humble room, he watched the fiery colors of the Madras turban, which the woman always wore, as it glided like some gorgeous bird through the thick foliage, nearer and nearer to the den where he had for two hours been waiting for news from the sick-chamber. The slave entered her dwelling, and sat down before her master, full of that consequential assumption that a little power is certain to call forth in one of her ignorant and degraded class. “Well, Louisa,” said the master, with a show of careless indifference, for he was of a cool and subtle temperament, with passions slow and calculating, but all the more grasping for the deliberation, with which, like well-trained hounds, they were let free from the leash of his strong will; “Well, Louisa, how is the lady this morning?”