And yet neither was he so utterly alone as he might have been.  For he was a cotton buyer.  In 1855 there was no business like the cotton business.  Everything else was subservient to that.  The cotton buyer’s part, in particular, was a “pretty business.”  The cotton factor was harassingly responsible to a whole swarm of planter patrons, of whose feelings he had to be all the more careful when they were in his debt.  The cotton broker could be bullied by his buyer.  But the buyer was answerable only to some big commercial house away off in Havre or Hamburg or Liverpool, that had to leave all but a few of the largest and most vital matters to his discretion.  Commendations and criticisms alike had to come by mail across the Atlantic.

Now, if a cotton buyer of this sort happened to be a bachelor, with no taste for society, was any one likely to care what he substituted, out of business hours, for the conventional relations of domestic life?  No one answers.  Cotton buyers of that sort were apt to have very comfortable furnished rooms in the old French quarter.  This one in Attalie’s house had the two main rooms on the first floor above the street.

Honestly, for all our winking and tittering, we know nothing whatever against this person’s private character except the sad fact that he was a man and a bachelor.  At forty-odd, it is fair to suppose, one who knows the world well enough to be the trusted agent of others, thousands of miles across the ocean, has bid farewell to all mere innocence and has made choice between virtue and vice.  But we have no proof whatever that Attalie’s cotton buyer had not solemnly chosen virtue and stuck to his choice as an Englishman can.

All we know as to this, really, is that for many years here he had roomed, and that, moved by some sentiment, we know not certainly what, he had again and again assured Attalie that she should never want while he had anything, and that in his will, whenever he should make it, she would find herself his sole legatee.  On neither side of the water, said he, had he any one to whom the law obliged him to leave his property nor, indeed, any large wealth; only a little money in bank—­a very indefinite statement.  In 1855 the will was still unwritten.

There is little room to doubt that this state of affairs did much interest Camille Ducour—­at a distance.  The Englishman may have known him by sight.  The kind of acquaintance he might have had with the quadroon was not likely to vary much from an acquaintance with some unknown neighbor’s cat on which he mildly hoped to bestow a pitcher of water if ever he caught him under his window.

Camille mentioned the Englishman approvingly to three other friends of Attalie, when, with what they thought was adroitness, they turned conversation upon her pecuniary welfare.  They were Jean d’Eau, a slumberous butcher; Richard Reau, an embarrassed baker; and one ——­ Ecswyzee, an illiterate but prosperous candlestick-maker.  These names may sound inexact, but can you prove that these were not their names and occupations?  We shall proceed.