Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/166

 "Come, mon brave!" cried Bouton de Rose, clapping him on the shoulder and drawing him back from the edge of the levee, "you are leaning perilously near that devil of a river. You look as if you were about to leap into the flood. Are you asleep, or bewitched? Upon my soul, it looks to me as if a voudou spell were on you; your eyes are starting out of your head! Has some witch willed that you should take a sudden passage to the Gulf viâ the river?"

Feuardent laughed uneasily, linked his arm in the young Parisian's, and after lighting a cigarette turned away from the levee. His voice was not heard in the chorus which the young men chanted as they took their way through the deserted business streets of the town, and when the youngest of the party proposed to serenade a lady of wide histrionic reputation then stopping in New Orleans, he begged to be excused on the plea of indisposition.

When he reached his room he poured out a full glass of wine and drank it at a draught. A chill had crept over him; lighting a fire, he sat beside the hearth, smoking, and staring into the flames with great unseeing eyes. When the morning light began to sift through the shutters, he extinguished the lamp and went to bed.