It startles, and for a moment dismays him. Where are they? He must have let them fall in his hasty retreat through the trees; or left them by the dead body.
Shall he go back in search of them?
No—no—no! He does not dare to return upon that track. The forest path is too sombre, too solitary, now. By the margin of the dank lagoon, under the ghostly shadow of the cypresses, he might meet the ghost of the man murdered!
And why should he go back? After all, there is no need; nothing in the letter which can in any way compromise him. Why should he care to recover it?
“It may go to the devil, her picture along! Let both rot where I suppose I must have dropped them—in the mud, or among the palmettoes. No matter where. But it does matter, my being under the magnolia at the right time, to meet her. Then shall I learn my fate—know it, for better, for worse. If the former, I’ll continue to believe in the story of Richard Plantagenet; if the latter, Richard Darke won’t much care what becomes of him.”
So ending his strange soliloquy, with a corresponding cast upon his countenance, the assassin rebuttons his coat—thrown open in search for the missing papers. Then, flinging the double-barrelled fowling-piece—the murder-gun—over his sinister shoulder, he strides off to keep an appointment not made for him, but for the man he has murdered!