Calhoun, not caring to continue the conversation, nor yet remain longer in company, spitefully spurred his horse, and trotted off over the prairie.
“Let me look at that card, Henry?” said Louise, speaking to her brother in a restrained voice. “I’m curious to see the cipher that has been of such service to us. Bring it away, brother: it can be of no further use where it is—now that we have sighted the tree.”
Henry, without the slightest suspicion of his sister’s motive for making the request, yielded obedience to it.
Releasing the piece of pasteboard from its impalement, he “chucked” it into her lap.
“Maurice Gerald!” muttered the young Creole, after deciphering the name upon the card. “Maurice Gerald!” she repeated, in apostrophic thought, as she deposited the piece of pasteboard in her bosom. “Whoever you are—whence you have come—whither you are going—what you may be—Henceforth there is a fate between us! I feel it—I know it—sure as there’s a sky above! Oh! how that sky lowers! Am I to take it as a type of this still untraced destiny?”
Chapter Four.
The Black Norther.
For some seconds, after surrendering herself to the Sybilline thoughts thus expressed, the young lady sate in silence—her white hands clasped across her temples, as if her whole soul was absorbed in an attempt, either to explain the past, or penetrate the future.