CHAPTER IX.
EUGENE LEROY AND ALFRED LORRAINE.
Nearly twenty years before the war, two young men, of French and Spanish descent, sat conversing on a large verandah which surrounded an ancient home on the Mississippi River.

It was French in its style of architecture, large and rambling, with no hint of modern improvements.
The owner of the house was the only heir of a Creole planter.

He had come into possession of an inheritance consisting of vast baronial estates, bank stock, and a large number of slaves.

Eugene Leroy, being deprived of his parents, was left, at an early age, to the care of a distant relative, who had sent him to school and college, and who occasionally invited him to spend his vacations at his home.

But Eugene generally declined his invitations, as he preferred spending his vacations at the watering places in the North, with their fashionable and not always innocent gayeties.