While this came so near to causing my dishonorable death, yet it was, under Divine Providence, the direct means of spreading before me a long life of happiness and honor. After a hard battle with my weaker self I lost the fight. Just as on the day I departed from Versailles, I determined, cost what it would, to see Agnes once again. So I wrote her a note. Such a blunt and clumsy billet as only a love-sick soldier or a country clown could have written. It craved pardon for the heat and the haste displayed by me when we parted at Sceaux; it implored one last interview before I left the colonies forever. I had not the art to conceal or veil my meaning, but told it out and plainly. Such a note as an idiotic boy might pen, or a simpering school lass be set fluttering to receive. I bade my man deliver this to Madame de la Mora on the morrow, charging him minutely and repeatedly to see it safe in her own hands. So careful was I, I did not doubt that even so stupid a lout as Jacques understood me perfectly. His further instructions were to meet me at the Bay when I should return in the evening from my visit to Colonel d'Ortez, and there beside its rippling waters--or so I had arranged--I was to receive her answer. It had now turned late of the night, and I sought repose. Sleep evaded my bed. What with my own restless desires, my chiding sense of ill-doing, and the d'Ortez story I had read, I tossed and tumbled through the remaining hours of darkness. Tumbled and tossed, whilst the sins and sufferings of men long dead passed and repassed with their spectral admonitions. Early on the morrow, while the day was yet cool, I crossed the Bay, and climbed the slope of sand before the lonely house. It looked more deserted and desolate than I had ever seen it. The stillness of solitary death clung as a pall about the place. Pachaco, the Indian servant, sat beside the gate, as motionless as the post against which he leaned. "How is the master, Pachaco?" I inquired, passing in. "Him die yesterday," came the stolid reply. "What? Dead! When?" "The shadows were at the longest," he answered, indicating by a gesture the western horizon. I hurried into the master's room. In the same position he had occupied, when, months ago, he had beckoned me to remain, he sat there, dead in his chair. His clothing hung about him in that sharply angular fashion in which garments cling to a corpse. Long, thin locks were matted above his brow, awesomely disarranged. But the pose of his head, drooped a little forward, suggested a melancholy reverie, nothing more. The golden locket, which he had shown me that well-remembered night, rested within his shrunken palm. I noted that the side was open which revealed the blazing bar of red. As if absorbed in that same unpleasant thought, there sat the master, dead; dead, and I alone knew his story. How vividly the old man's sorrow came back; how it oppressed me.