As he did so an item of personal mention caught his attention. Mr. Randal Ducie was in the city, doubtless in connection with the gathering of planters to consult with the Levee Commission in regard to river protection. A meeting would be held this evening at the Adelantado Hotel. This was the most natural thing in the world. Half the planters in the river bottom were in active coöperation seeking to influence the Levee Commission, or the State Legislature, or the Federal Government to take some adequate measures to prevent the inundation of their cotton lands by a general overflow of the great Mississippi River, according to the several prepossessions relative to the proper plans, and means, and agency to that end. But as he read the haphazard words of the paragraph the blood flared fiercely in Floyd-Rosney’s face; a fire glowed in his eyes, hot and furious; his hand was trembling; his breath came quick. And he was well nigh helpless even to conjecture if his wife’s absence had aught of connection with this ill-starred appearance of the lover of her girlhood. He--Edward Floyd-Rosney, baffled, hoodwinked, set at naught! Could this thing be! For one moment, for one brief moment, he upbraided himself. But for his tyranny in sending off the child without her consent, without even consulting her, but for his determination that, willing or no, she should expatriate herself for a year, and, with neither husband nor child, tour a foreign country in company of his selection they might already be seated in their box at the opera, rapt by the concord of sweet sounds in the midst of the most elegant and refined presentment of their world, at peace with each other and in no danger of damaging and humiliating revelations of domestic discord. He heard the puffing of the limousine at the curb below the windows, and he turned to the maid. “I can find no scrape of a pen--no note here. Do you know what gown she wore?”