quiet hotel from whose eastern veranda it was but a step to the centre
of a sunny shell-paved court where two fountains danced and tinkled to
each other. Along its farther bound ran a vine-clad fence where a row of
small tables dumbly invited the flushed visitor to be inwardly cooled.
By a narrow gate in this fence, near its townward end, a shelled walk
lured on into a musky air of verdurous alleys that led and misled,
crossed, doubled, and mazed among flowering shrubs from bower to bower.
Out of sight in there the loiterer came at startling moments face to
face with banks of splendid bloom in ravishing negligee--Diana disrobed,
as it were, while that untiring sensation-hunter, the mocking-bird,
leaped and sang and clapped his wings in a riot of scandalous mirth.

In the ground-floor dining-room of that unanimated hotel sat an old
gentleman named Brodnax, once of the regular army, a retired veteran of
the Mexican war, and very consciously possessed of large means. He sat
quite alone, in fine dress thirty years out of fashion, finishing a late
lunch and reading a newspaper; a trim, hale man not to be called old in
his own hearing. He had read everything intended for news or
entertainment and was now wandering in the desert of the advertising
columns, with his mind nine miles away, at the other end of New Orleans.

Although not that person whom numerous men of his acquaintance had begun
affectionately to handicap with the perilous nickname of "the ladies'
man," he was thinking of no less than five ladies; two of one name and
three of another. Flora Valcour and her French grandmother (as well as
her brother of nineteen, already agog to be off in the war) had but
lately come to New Orleans, from Mobile. On a hilly border of that
smaller Creole city stood the home they had left, too isolated, with war
threatening, for women to occupy alone. Mrs. Callender was the young
widow of this old bachelor's life-long friend, the noted judge of that