"I ain't in no hurry," replied Bowen. "Now I want to take a squint at whatever lies behind yonder map." Silas suppressed a half-muttered oath; but reluctantly touched a spring. A door flew back. They entered a long, narrow passage. At its end was a window having a view of a large gambling saloon! CHAPTER VII. PRIDE OF CASTE. Nearly a month had elapsed since the arrival of the Virginia in the harbor of New Orleans, and still Adelaide Horton and Cora Leslie had not met. The young creole, generous-hearted as she was, had never felt the same affection for her old school-fellow since the fatal revelation made by Silas Craig. It was in vain that the generosity of her nature would have combated with the prejudices of her education; pride of caste was the stronger, and she could not but despise Cora, the lovely descendant of slaves. In the meantime the two girls had ceased to meet. The nature of Adelaide Horton was capricious, and volatile, and, in a few days, she had almost dismissed Cora's image from her memory. Indolent, like all creoles, Adelaide spent the greater part of her days in a rocking-chair, reading a novel, while fanned by her favorite slave, Myra. Mortimer Percy was, as we know, by no means the most attentive of lovers, although living in the same house as that occupied by his fair cousin. He saw her but seldom, and then evinced an indifference and listlessness which often wounded the volatile girl. "How weary and careless he is," she thought; "how different to Gilbert Margrave, the artist, the poet, the enthusiast!" Alas, Adelaide, beware of that love which is given without return! Beware of the bitter humiliation of finding that he whom you have secretly admired and reverenced--he whose image you have set upon the altar of your heart, and have worshipped in the sanctity of silence and of dreaming--that even he, the idol, the beloved, looks on you with indifference, while another usurps the earnest devotion of his poet soul. Adelaide Horton had ample time for indulgence in those waking dreams which are often so dangerous. A school-girl, young, romantic and frivolous, ignorant of the harsh ways of the world, she built fair castles in the air--ideal palaces in a lovely dreamland, which were only too soon to be shattered to the ground. Gilbert Margrave came to New Orleans armed with those brilliant schemes of inventions in machinery, which might, as he fondly hoped, supersede slave labor, though not militating against the employment of the many.