Chapter 2

I

Helena was back.

Magdaléna sat amidst iridescent billows of ballgowns, dinner-gowns, tea-gowns, négligés, demi-toilettes, calling-frocks, street-frocks, yachting-frocks, summer-frocks. She had never seen so many clothes outside of a dry-goods shop, and marvelled that any one woman should want so many. They were on the bed, the chairs, the tables, the divan. Two mammoth trunks were but half unpacked. Others, empty, made the hall impassable.

"I love dress," said Helena, superfluously. "And women forgive your beauty and brains so much more willingly if you divert their attention by the one thing their soul can admire without bitterness."

"You have not grown cynical, Helena?" asked Magdaléna, anxiously.

"A little. It's a phase of extreme youth which must run its course with the down on the peach. I fought against it because I want to be original, but you might as well fight against a desire to sing at the top of your voice when you are happy. But, you darling! I'm so glad to see you again."

She flung herself on her knees beside Magdaléna and demanded to be kissed. Magdaléna, who could hardly realise that she was back, and whose loves were as fixed as the roots of the redwoods, gave her a great hug.

"Tell me, 'Léna, am I improved? Am I beautiful? Am I a great beauty?"

"You are the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Of course I have not seen the great beauties of Europe--"

"They are not a patch to ours. When I was presented, there were eight professionals standing round, and I walked away from the lot of them. Am I more beautiful than Tiny, or Ila, or Caro, or Mrs. Washington?"

"Oh, yes! yes!"

"How? They are really very beautiful."

"I know; but you are--you know I never could express myself."

"I am Helena Belmont," replied that young woman, serenely. "Besides, I've got the will to be beautiful as well as the outside. Tiny hasn't. I have real audacity, and Ila only a make-believe. Caro shows her cards every time she rolls her eyes, and Mrs. Washington never had a particle of dash. I'm going to be the belle. I'm going to turn the head of every man in San Francisco."

"I'm afraid you will, Helena."

"Afraid? You know you want me to. It wouldn't be half such fun if you weren't approving and applauding."

"I don't want you to hurt anybody."

"Hurt?" Helena opened her dark-blue pellucid eyes. "The idea of bothering about a trifle like that. Men expect to get a scratch or two for the privilege of knowing us. It will be something for a man to remember for the rest of his life that I've 'hurt' him."

"I am afraid you're a spoilt beauty already, Helena."

"I've got the world at my feet. That's a lovely sensation. You can't think--it's a wonderful sensation."

"I can imagine it." Magdaléna spoke without bitterness. Helena realised all her old ambitions but one, but she was too happy for envy.

"Describe Mr. Trennahan all over again."

"I am such a bad hand at describing."

"Well, never mind. Fancy your being engaged! Tell me everything. How did you feel the first moment you met him? When did you find yourself going? It must be such a jolly sensation to be in love--for a week or so. Now! Tell me all."

"I'd rather not, Helena. I love you better than anyone besides, but I am not the kind that can talk--"

"Well, perhaps I couldn't talk about it, myself, but I think I could. I can't imagine not talking about anything. But of course you are the same old 'Léna. Will you let me read his letters?"

"Oh, no! no!"

"I'll show you every letter I get. I never could be so stingy."

"I could not do that. I should feel as if I had lost something."

"You were always so romantic. There never was any romance about me. Poor Mr. Trennahan will have something to do to live up to you. An altitude of eleven thousand feet is trying to most masculine constitutions. But I suppose he likes the variety of it, after twenty years of society girls. Well, let him rest."

A door shut heavily in the hall below. Helena sprang to her feet.

"There's papa. I must go down. I never leave him a minute alone if I can help it. That's my only crumpled rose-leaf,--he is so pale and seems so depressed at times. You know how jolly and dashing he used to be. He hasn't a thing to worry him, and I can't think what is the matter. I beg him to tell me, but he says a man at his age can't expect to be well all the time. I can always amuse him, and I like to be with him all I can. He's such a darling! He'd build me a house of gold if I asked for it."

II

When Magdaléna returned home she spread her new garments on the bed and regarded them with much satisfaction. Helena had expended no less thought on these than on her own, and none whatever on the meagreness of Don Roberto's check. There was a brown tweed with a dash of scarlet, a calling-frock of fawn-coloured camel's hair and silk, a dinner-gown of pale blue with bunches of scarlet poppies, and a miraculous coming-out gown of ivory gauze, the deepest shade that could be called white. And besides two charming hats there was a large box of presents: fans, silk stockings, gloves, handkerchiefs, and soft indescribable things for the house toilette. And her trousseau was also to come from Paris! Don Roberto, in his delight at having secured Trennahan, had informed his daughter that she should have a trousseau fit for a princess; or, on second thoughts, for a Yorba.

Magdaléna opened a drawer and took out another of Helena's presents,--a jewelled dagger. While Colonel Belmont and his daughter were in Madrid there was a sale of a spendthrift noble's treasures. They had gone to see the famous collection, and among other things the dagger was shown them.

"It belonged to a lady of the great house of Yorba," they were told. "She always wore it in her hair, and all men worshipped her. The old women said it was the dagger that made men love her, that it was bewitched; there were other women as beautiful. But men died for this one and no other. One day she lost the dagger, and after that men loved her no longer. They ran and threw themselves at the feet of the women that had hated her. She laughed in scorn and said that she wanted no such love, and that when one returned--he had gone as Ambassador to the Court of France--he would show the world that his love did not skulk in the hilt of a dagger. People marvelled at this because she had flouted her very skirts in his face, had not thrown him so much as the humblest flower of hope. When they heard he was coming, they held their breath to see if the magnet had been in the dagger for him too. He arrived in the night, and in the morning she was found in her bed with the dagger to the hilt in her heart. They accused him, and he would not say yes or no, but they could prove nothing and let him go. And when he died the dagger was found among his possessions. No one could ever say how he got it. But it has remained in his family until to-day--and now it goes where?"

"To a Yorba!" announced Helena to Magdaléna, as she repeated this yarn. "I made up my mind to that, double quick! It may or may not be true, and she may or may not have been your ancestress; but it would make a jolly present all the same, so I ordered papa to buy it if all Madrid bid against him. Of course he did what I told him, and I want you to wear it the night of the party."

Magdaléna regarded it with great awe. She was by no means without superstition. Would it bring men to her feet? Not that she wanted them now, but she would like one evening of intoxicating success, just for the sake of her old ambitions: they had been little less than entities at one time; for old friendship's sake she would like to give them their due. She did wish that she felt a thrill as she touched it,--a vibration of the attenuated thread which connected one of her soul's particles with that other soul which, perhaps, had contributed its quota to her making. But she felt nothing, and replaced the dagger with some chagrin.

She put away the clothes and sat down before the fire to think of Trennahan. He had gone East at the summons of his mother, who had invested a large sum of money unwisely,--a habit she had. He might be detained some weeks. Magdaléna, on the whole, was glad to have him gone for a while. She wanted to think about him undisturbed, and she wanted to get used to Helena and her exactions while his demands were abstract: she loved so hard that she must rub the edge off her delight in having Helena again, or the two would tear her in twain.

She found the sadness of missing him very pleasurable,--feeling sure of his return; also the painful thrill every morning when the postman knocked. And to sit in retrospect of the summer was delicious. There may have been flaws in its present; there were none in its past. Her ambition to write was dormant. A woman's brain in love is like a garden planted with one flower. There may be room for a weed or two, but for none other of the floral kingdom.

Trennahan had given her more than one glimpse of his past, and it had appalled without horrifying or repulsing her. Her sympathy had been swift and unerring. She realised that Trennahan had come to California at a critical point in his moral life, and that his complete regeneration depended on his future happiness. He had pointed this out as a weakness, but the fact was all that concerned her. Whatever mists there might be between her perceptions and the great abstractions of life, love had sharpened all that love demanded and pointed them straight at all in Trennahan that he wished her to know. She was awed by the tremendous responsibility, but confident that she was equal to it; for did she not love him wholly, and had he not chosen her, by the light of his great experience, out of all women? She would walk barefooted on Arctic snows or accept any other ordeal that came her way, but she would make him happy.

Suddenly she remembered that she had received a brief dictated note from her aunt that morning, asking her to pack and send to Santa Barbara a painting of the Virgin which hung in her old apartments: she wished to present it to the Mission. Mr. Polk had closed his house a year before and taken up his permanent abode with the Yorbas, but his Chinese major-domo was in charge. Magdaléna reflected that it was not necessary to bother her uncle, who had seemed ill and restless of late; the Chinaman could attend to the matter.

She went downstairs and through the gardens to the adjoining house. The weeds grew high behind it; the windows were dusty; the side door at which she rang needed painting. The Chinaman answered in his own good time. He looked a little sodden; doubtless he employed much of his large leisure with the opium pipe. Magdaléna bade him follow her to her aunt's apartments. As she ascended the imposing staircase she withdrew her hand hastily from the banister.

"Why do you not keep things clean?" she asked disgustedly.

"Whattee difflence? Nobody come," he replied with the philosophy of his kind.

The very air was musty and dusty. The black walnut doors, closed and locked, looked like the sealed entrances to so many vaults. The sound of a rat gnawing echoed through the hollow house. It seemed what it was, this house,--the sarcophagus of a beautiful woman's youth and hopes.

For a year or two after the house was built Mrs. Polk had given magnificent entertainments, scattering her husband's dollars in a manner that made his thin nostrils twitch, and without the formality of his consent. Magdaléna paused at a bend of the stair and tried to conjure up a brilliant throng in the dark hall below, the great doors of the parlours rolled back, the rooms flooded with the soft light of many candles; her aunt, long, willowy, of matchless grace, her marvellous eyes shooting scorn at the Americans crowding about her, standing against the gold-coloured walls in the blood-red satin she had shown once to her small admirers. But the vision would not rise. There was only a black well below, a rat crunching above.

She reached the door of her aunt's private apartments on the second floor and entered. She stepped back amazed. There was no dust here, no musty air, no dimness of window. A fire burned on the hearth. The gas was lit and softly shaded. The vases on the mantel were full of flowers. On one table was a basket of fruit; on another were the illustrated periodicals.

"Mrs. Polk is here?" she said to Ah Sin.

"No, missee."

"She is expected, then? How odd--"

"Donno, missee. Evey day, plenty days, one, two, thlee weeks, me fixee rooms all same this."

"But why?"

"Kin sabbee, missee. Mr. Polk tellee me, and me do allee same whattee he say."

Magdaléna's lips parted, and her breath came short.

She gave the necessary instructions about the picture. The Chinaman followed her down the stairs and opened the door. As she was passing out, she turned suddenly and said to him,--

"It is not necessary to tell Mr. Polk about this, nor that I have been here. He does not like to be bothered about little things."

"Allight, missee."

III

The night of Mrs. Yorba's long-heralded ball had arrived at last. For weeks Society had been keenly expectant, for its greatest heiress and its three most beautiful girls were to come forth from the seclusion in which they were supposed to have been cultivating their minds, into the great world of balls, musicales, and teas, where their success would be in inverse ratio to their erudition.

Rose and Caro had arrived the winter before, and were no longer "buds;" but Magdaléna, Helena, Tiny, and Ila were hardly known by sight outside the Menlo Park set. Magdaléna had never hung over the banisters at her mother's parties. The others had been abroad so long that the most exaggerated stories of their charms prevailed.

The old beaux knotted their white ties with trembling fingers and thought of the city's wild young days when Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt Maclean, two of the "Three Macs," and the sinuous wife of Don Pedro Earle had set their pulses humming. They were lonely old bachelors, many of them, living at the Union or the Pacific Club, and they sighed as the memories rose. That was a day when every other woman in society was a great beauty, and as full of fascination as a fig of seeds. To-day beautiful women in San Francisco's aristocracy were rare. In Kearney Street, on a Saturday afternoon, one could hardly walk for the pretty painted shop-girls; and in that second stratum which was led by the wife of a Bonanza king who had been pronounced quite impossible by Mrs. Yorba and other dames of the ancient aristocracy, there were many stunningly handsome girls. They could be met at the fashionable summer resorts; they were effulgent on first nights; they were familiar in Kearney Street on other afternoons than Saturday, and their little world was gay in its way; but Society, that exclusive body which owned its inchoation and later its vitality and coherence to that brilliant and elegant little band of women who came, capable and experienced, to the fevered ragged city of the early Fifties, still struggled in the Eighties to preserve its traditions, and did not admit the existence of these people; feminine curiosity was not even roused to the point of discussion. One day Mrs. Washington met one of the old beaux, Ben Sansome by name, on the summit of California Street hill, which commands one of the finest views of a city swarming over an hundred hills.

Mrs. Washington waved her hand at the large region known as South San Francisco.

"I suppose," she said thoughtfully, "that there are a lot of people in San Francisco whose names we have never heard."

"I suppose so!" he exclaimed.

"I wonder what they are like? How many people are there in San Francisco, anyhow?"

"About three hundred thousand."

"Really? really?" and Mrs. Washington shrugged her pretty shoulders and dismissed the subject from her mind.

Would these new beauties compare with that galaxy of long ago? was the thought that danced between Ben Sansome's faded eyes and his mirror. Three to burst forth in a night! That was unwonted measure. Of late years one in three seasons had inspired fervent gratitude. Nelly Washington had been unchallenged for ten years; Caro Folsom was second-rate beside her; and Rose Geary, the favourite of last winter, although piquant and pretty, had not a pretension to beauty. Like the other old beaux, he went only to the balls and dinners of the old-timers, never to the dances and musicales of the youngsters, but he kept a sharp look-out, nevertheless. To-night assumed the proportions of an event in his life.

Several of the young men had met two of these beauties during the summer, but Helena was still to be experienced. The young hands did not tremble, but their eyes were very bright as they wondered if they were "in for it," if they would "get it in the neck," if she were really "a little tin goddess on wheels." Even Rollins, who was madly enamoured of Tiny, and Fort, who had carefully calculated his chances with Rose, were big with curiosity. The former, who had known Helena from childhood, had been refused admittance to the Belmont mansion: Helena had a very distinct intention of making a sensation upon her first appearance in San Francisco; and as all were fish that came to her net, even Rollins must be dazzled with the rest.

Magdaléna's engagement was a closely guarded secret, and more than one hardy youth had made up his mind to storm straight through her intellect to her millions; but even these thought only of Helena as they dressed for the ball.

Meanwhile the girls were thinking more of their toilettes than of the men who would admire them. All were to wear white, but each gown had been made at a different Paris house, that there should be no monotony of touch and cut, and each was of different shade and material: Magdaléna's of ivory gauze, Tiny's of pearl-white silk, Ila's of cream-white embroidered _mousseline de soie_, Helena's of pure white tulle.

What little of Magdaléna's neck the gown exposed, she concealed with a broad band of cherry-coloured velvet, and a deep necklace of Turkish coins, a gift from Ila. She revolved before the mirror several times in succession after the maid had left the room. She was laced so tightly that she could scarcely breathe, but she rejoiced in her likeness to a French fashion-plate, and vowed never to wear a home-made gown again. In her hair was a string of pearls that Trennahan had given her; and the dagger. Would it work the spell?

She gave a final shake to her skirts and went downstairs.

There was no lack of gas to-night; the lower part of the house was one merciless glare. No flowers graced the square ugly rooms, no decorations of any sort; but the parlours were canvased, the best band in town was tuning up, and the supper would be irreproachable. The dark-brown paper of the hall looked very old and dingy, the carpet was threadbare in places, the big teak-wood tables were in everybody's way and looked as if they were meant for the dead to rest on; but when gay gowns were billowing one would not notice these things.

Mrs. Yorba was in the green reception-room at the end of the hall. She wore black velvet and a few diamonds, and looked impressively null. Tiny and Ila arrived almost immediately. They looked, the one an angel with a sense of humour, the other Circean with an eye to the conventions, both as smart as Paris could make them. It was nearly ten o'clock, and there was a rush just after.

Magdaléna waited a half-hour for Helena, then opened the ball in a brief waltz with Alan Rush instead of the quadrille in which the four débutantes were to dance. She sent a message to Helena, and Mrs. Cartright scribbled back that the poor dear child had altered the trimming on her bodice at the last moment, and would not be ready for an hour yet. Caro took her place in the quadrille, as she also wore white.

The ball promised to be a success. There were more young people than was usual at Mrs. Yorba's parties, and more men than girls. They danced and chatted with untiring energy, and between the dances they flirted on the stairs and in every possible nook and corner. Magdaléna frolicked little, having her guests to look after; but whenever she rested for a moment there was an obsequious backbone before her. Tiny and Ila were besieged for dances, and divided each.

The older women sat against the wall, a dado of fat and diamonds, and indulged in much caustic criticism.

The old beaux stood in a group and exchanged opinions on the relative pretensions of the old and the new.

"Take it all in all, not to compare," said Ben Sansome. "Miss Montgomery is excessively pretty, but no figure and no style. Miss Brannan looks like a Parisian cocotte. Miss Folsom has eyes, but nothing else--and when you think of 'Lupie Hathaway's eyes! And not one has the beginnings of the polished charm of manner, the fire of glance, the _je ne sais quoi_ of Mrs. Hunt Maclean. Just look at her in her silver brocade, her white hair _à la marquise_. She's handsomer than the whole lot of them--"

At that moment Helena entered the room.

The white tulle gown, made with a half-dozen skirts, floated about her so lightly that she seemed rising from, suspended above it. Even beside her father she looked tall; and her neck and arms, the rise of her girlish bust, were more dazzlingly white than the diaphanous substance about her. Her haughty little head was set well back on a full firm throat, not too long. Her cheeks were touched with pink; her lips were full of it. Her long lashes and low straight brows were many shades darker than the unruly mane of glittering coppery hair. And she carried herself with a swing, with an imperious pride, with a nonchalant command of immediate and unmeasured admiration which sent every maiden's heart down with a drop and every man's pulses jumping.

"I give in!" gasped Ben Sansome. "We never had anything like that--never! Gad! the girl's got everything. It's almost unfair."

Alan Rush turned white, but he did not lose his presence of mind. He asked Don Roberto to present him at once, and secured the next dance. It was a waltz; and as the admirably mated couple floated down the room, many others paused to watch them. Helena's limpid eyes, raised to the eager ones above her, did all the execution of which they were capable. During the next entre-dance she was mobbed. Twenty men pressed about her, introduced by Don Roberto and Rollins, until she finally commanded them to "go away and give her air," then walked off with Eugene Fort, finishing his first epigram and mocking at his second. He had only a fourth of the next dance; but as Helena had refused to permit her admirers to write their names on her card, and as she was at no pains to remember which fourth was whose, giving her scraps to the first comer, Rush and Fort, who had had the forethought not to pre-engage themselves, and were constantly in her wake, secured more than their share. But the other men had time and energy to fight for their own: Helena was constantly stopped in the middle of the room with a firm demand that she should keep her word. Between the dances the men crowded about her, eager for a glance, and at supper the small table before her looked like an offering at a Chinese funeral.

"Well," exclaimed Mrs. Washington, "I always said that no girl could be a belle in this town nowadays, that the men didn't have gumption enough; but I reckon it's because the rest of us haven't come up to the mark. This looks like the stories they tell of old times."

"It makes me think of old times," said Mr. Sansome. "Makes me feel young again; or older than ever. I can't decide which."

Tiny took her eclipse with unruffled philosophy, and divided her smiles between two or three faithful suppliants. Ila had a very high colour, and her primal fascination was less reserved than usual. Rose admired Helena too extravagantly for jealousy, and what Caro felt no man ever knew.

Colonel Belmont renewed his acquaintance with many of the women of his youth, long neglected, although he had loved more than one of them in his day. They filled his ears with praises of his beautiful daughter. Helena's beauty was of that rare order which compels the willing admiration of her own sex: it was not only indisputable, but it warmed and irradiated. When Colonel Belmont was not talking, he stood against the wall and followed her with adoring eyes. If she had been a failure--admitting the possibility--his disappointment would have been far keener than hers.

"You've cause to be proud, as proud as Lucifer," said Mr. Polk to him. "But you ain't looking well, Jack. What's the matter?"

"I'm well enough. I shall live long enough to give her to someone who's good enough for her, and that's all I care about--although I'm in no hurry for that, either. But I'm _not_ feeling right smart, Hi; I don't just know what's the matter."

"We're both getting old. I feel like a worked-out old cart-horse. But you've got ten years the best of me, and I'll tell you what's the matter with you: you can't switch off drink at your age after being two thirds full for twenty-five years. We all need whiskey as we grow older, and the more we've had, the more we need. I'd advise you to take it up again in moderation."

"Not if it's the death of me! It's nothing or everything with me. The first cocktail, and I'd be off on a jamboree. Then she'd know, and I'd blow out my brains with the shame of it. She thinks I'm the finest fellow in the world now, and so she shall if I suffer the tortures of the damned."

"Well, I guess you're right. The young fellows talk about dying for the girls, but I guess we're the ones that would do that for our own if it came to the scratch."

"It's too bad you have none," said Colonel Belmont, with the sympathy of his own full measure. And then, although Mr. Polk's iron features did not move, he looked away hastily.

"I guess I didn't deserve any," Mr. Polk answered harshly. "I don't know that you did, for that matter, but I certainly didn't. Look at Don cavorting round with those girls," he added viciously. "It's positively sickening."

"Not a bit of it. He's making up for what he's missed. And a little of it would do you good, old fellow. You've never had half enough fun, and you ought to take a little before it's too late. You haven't a pound of flesh on you, and are as spry as any of them. Go and make yourself agreeable to the girls. Even a smile from them goes a long way, I assure you."

Mr. Polk shook his head. "I couldn't think of a thing to say to them. I didn't learn when I was young."

IV

When Magdaléna drew the dagger out of her hair that night, she laughed a little and tossed it into her handkerchief box. She had seen men carried off their feet for the first time, not caring whether the world laughed or not. She had also noted the exact order of homage that she was to expect from men. Helena infatuated. The other girls inspired admiration in varying measure. Respect for her father's millions was her portion. She had watched and compared all the evening. It would have distressed and appalled her had she made her début last winter. As it was, it mattered little.

Occasionally there is a lively winter in San Francisco. This promised to be almost brilliant. There were six balls in the next two weeks. At each Helena's triumphs were reiterated. The men waited in a solid body between the front door and the staircase, and she had promised, divided, and subdivided every dance before she had set foot on the lowest step. It was almost impossible to begin a party until her arrival. Kettledrums had been inaugurated the previous winter, and hardly a man been got to them. Now the men would have begged for invitations. They even began to attend church; and Helena's "evening" was so crowded that she was obliged to ask five or six of her girl friends to help her. Alan Rush, Eugene Fort, Carter Howard, a Southerner of charming manners, infinite tact, and little conversation, and "Dolly" Webster, a fledgeling of enormous length and well-proportioned brain, were her shadows, her serfs, her determined, trembling adorers. They barely hated one another, so devoured were they by the sovereign passion; and as they were treated with exasperating similitude, there was nothing to set them at one another's throats.

Helena had all the gifts and arts of the supreme coquette. She allured and mocked, appealed and commanded; adapted herself with the suppleness of bronze to mould, with enchanting flashes of egotism; discarded all perception of man's existence in the abstract, when she had surrendered her attention to one, to jerk him out of his heaven by ordering him to go and send her his rival; possessed a quickness of intuition which finished a man's sentences with her eyes, an exquisite sympathy which made a man feel that here at last he was understood (as he would wish himself understood, rather than as he understood himself); an audacity which never failed to surprise, and never shocked; a fund of talk which never wore itself into platitudes, and a willing ear; and an absolute confidence in herself and her destiny. In addition she had great beauty, the high light spirits of her mercurial temperament, a charming and equable manner (when not engaged in judiciously tormenting her slaves), and a shrewd brain. What wonder that her sovereignty was something for the men who worshipped her to remember when they too were old beaux, and that their present condition was abject? The wonder was that the women did not hate her; but so impulsive and unaffected a creature disarms her own sex, particularly when her gowns are faultless, and she is not lifeless in their company, to scintillate the moment a man enters the room.

And they forbore to criticise the dictates of her royal fancy. It is true that she deferred to no one's opinion, but she escaped criticism nevertheless. If she capriciously refused to dance at a party, but sat the night through with one man, not recognising the existence of her lowering train, people merely smiled and shrugged their shoulders, saving their scowls for those who were not the fashion. Sometimes these flirtations took place in the open ball-room, sometimes in the conservatory; it was all one to Helena, whose powers of concentration amounted to genius. At one of the Presidio hops she spent the evening--it was moonlight--in a boat on the bay with an officer who was as accomplished a flirt as herself. The appearance of Rush, Fort, Howard, and Webster upon this occasion was pitiable. On her evening, if she tired of her admirers before they could reasonably be expected to leave, she walked out of the room without excuse and went to bed. She not only ran to fires when the humour seized her, but she commanded her quartette to rush every time the alarm sounded, that they might be at her beck in the event of officious policemen. As fires are frequent in San Francisco, these enamoured young men were profoundly thankful when they occurred at such times as they happened to be in their tyrant's presence: they were willing to bundle into their clothes at two in the morning, or to leave their duties at midday, were they sure of meeting her; but as she was as capricious about fires as about everything else, their chances were as one in ten. They hinted once that she might advise them of her pleasure by telephone, but were peremptorily snubbed. Helena never made concessions.

It was at the end of the second month that her father imported a coach from New York. She had driven since her baby days, and could handle four horses as scientifically as one. Thereafter, one of the sights of Golden Gate Park on fine afternoons was Helena on the box of the huge black and yellow structure, tooling a party of her delighted friends, her father beside her, one of her admirers crouched at her indifferent shoulder. It was the only gentleman's coach in California, for in the Eighties the youth of the city had not turned their wits and prowess to sport. Few of them could drive with either grace or assurance, and Helena's accomplishment was the more renowned. Occasionally Colonel Belmont was allowed to drive, a favour which he enjoyed with all the keenness of his dashing youth.

"I told you how it would be," said Ila to Rose. "She is not only belle, but leader. That's the real reason Caro's gone to New York. We are nowhere. I'd turn eccentric, regularly shock people, if I had the good luck to be the fashion. But I've got to marry well. When I have--you'll see."

"We can't all be raving belles," said Rose. "If Helena were so much as doubled, the men would be gibbering idiots. I don't care, so long as I have a good time; and I hold my own. So do you. As for Tiny, she may not be mobbed, but she has one man in love with her after another. As soon as poor Charley Rollins got his congé, Bob Payne took the vacant seat, and I see a third climbing over the horizon with business in his eye. There can be only one sun, but we're all stars of the first magnitude."

"But we'd each like to be the sun, all the same."

V

Magdaléna, although much interested in Helena's performances, felt at times as if dream-walking, half expecting to awaken at the foot of her little altar. In the days when she had prayed, full of faith, for beauty and its triumphs, although ignorance had handled the brush of her imagination, yet the vigorous outline sketch had closely resembled all that was now the portion of her friend. She pondered on the fancy she had had as a child that Helena realised all her own little ambitions. She certainly had realised all her larger, but one. She dreaded to ask Helena if she had ever cared to write, fearing to surprise a confession to the authorship of the novel of the day. This, she concluded, after due reflection, was exaggeration; for if Helena had written, even without publication, she certainly would have talked about it, reticence being no vice of hers. But the suggestion might prick a latent talent into action. This was just the one thing Magdaléna could not endure, and she decided to let the talent sleep. The rest mattered little, aside from the sense of failure which the vicarious accomplishment of ambition must always induce; for she had her advantage of Helena, the greatest one woman can have of another. She was happy, but Helena was only satisfied for the moment; so restless and passionate a heart would not long remain content with the husks. It was true that Trennahan had not gone mad over herself as other men over Helena; but what of that? It was a question of years alone.

It was now three months since he had left California. He had found his mother's affairs in a serious condition, but had managed to gather up the threads, and the knot would be tied before long. There was no doubt about his desire to return. In fact, as the time waned, his ardour waxed. Sometimes Magdaléna was driven to wonder if his yearning for California or herself were the greater; but on the whole she was satisfied, for she liked to accept his fancy that the two were indissoluble. He wrote delightful letters, witty and graceful, full of interesting gossip, and with many personal and tender pages. But the novelty of his absence had worn off some time since, and she longed impatiently for his return. She was caught in the whirl of social activity, and was the restless Helena's constant companion; nevertheless, there were lonely hours, when the future with its imperious demands routed the past.

The engagement was still a profound secret; Magdaléna had told Helena at once, but it was unguessed by anyone else. Mrs. Yorba had insisted that her daughter should have one brilliant girl season. The truth was that she was delighted at Don Roberto's sudden interest in the world of fashion, and was determined to make the most of it. He developed, indeed, into an untiring seeker after the innocent amusements of his wife's exclusive kingdom, and had given a fashionable tailor permission to bring his wardrobe down to date; he had hitherto worn clothes of the same cut for twenty years. The girls always gave him a square dance; during the round dances he stood against the wall with Mr. Polk and Colonel Belmont, and fairly beamed with good-will. The Yorbas seldom spent an evening at home unless their own doors were open, and Don Roberto consented to two parties and several large dinners. Mrs. Yorba shuddered sometimes at the weakening of her inborn and long-nurtured economical faculty, but thoroughly enjoyed herself--forming an important item of the dado--and hoped that her husband's enthusiasm would endure.

VI

"I'm not a bit blasé," remarked Helena, "but I'd like to be engaged for a change--not to last, of course. Only I can't make up my mind which of the four; and whichever I choose the other three will be so disagreeable. If I could only let them know I didn't mean it,--at least wouldn't later,--but that would never do, because I shouldn't enjoy myself unless I really thought I was in earnest. Besides, I haven't been able to fall in love with any of them yet."

"You don't really mean what you say when you talk that way, do you, Helena?" asked Magdaléna, with much concern. "It would be so--so unprincipled; and I can't bear to think that of you."

"But, 'Léna dearest, I should be in earnest for the time being; I'm just talking from the outside, as it were. At the time I should think I really meant it. Otherwise I'd be bored to death, and the engagement wouldn't last five minutes after I was. I'm simply wild to fall in love, if only to see what it's like. You won't tell me; anyhow, I don't think that would satisfy all my curiosity if you did. I wish some new man would come along."

"Alan Rush is charming."

"He's too much in love with me."

"Mr. Fort keeps your wits on the jump."

"My wits are in my brain, not my heart."

"Mr. Howard?"

"He has so much tact that he has no sincerity."

"There is still Mr. Webster."

"Poor Dolly!"

"What _do_ you want?"

Helena was moving restlessly about her boudoir,--a bower of pearl-grey embroidered with wild roses, in which she reclined luxuriously when free from social duties, and improved her mind. A volume of Motley lay on the floor. Walter Pater's "Imaginary Portraits" was slipping off the divan, and there was a pile of Reviews on the table. She was biting the corner of a volume of Herrick.

"I haven't any ideal, if that's what you mean. I think it would have to be a man of the world, for conversation so soon gives out with the men of this village. Mr. Fort takes refuge in epigrams. If I married--became engaged to him--I should feel as if I were living on pickles. I think that one reason why Alan Rush and Mr. Howard are so determined to make love to me is because they have nothing left to talk about."

"You've told me twice what you don't want, but you don't seem to know what you do. 'A man of the world' is not very definite."

"No; he must be capable of falling violently in love with me, and at the same time not make himself ridiculous; to keep his head except when I particularly want him to lose it. Of course I want to inspire a grand passion as well as to feel one, but I don't want to be surrounded by it; and the first time he looked ridiculous would be the last of him as far as I was concerned. I might be in the highest stages of the divine passion, and that would cure me."

"Well! is that all? Some men could not be ridiculous if they tried."

"You are thinking of Mr. Trennahan, of course. If he did, I do believe you wouldn't see it. But I should; I have a hideous sense of the ridiculous. Well, lemme see. He must have read and travelled and thought a lot, so that he would know more than I, and I could look up to him; also that subjects of conversation would not give out. The platitudes of love! That would be fatal."

"I don't believe they ever sound like platitudes."

"Hm! I won't undertake to discuss that point, knowing my limitations. What next? He must have suffered. That gives a man weight, as the sculptors say. My quartette will be much more interesting to the next divinity than they are to me. Then of course he must have charming manners and an agreeable voice: I could not stand the brain of a Bismark in the skull of an Apollo if he had a nasal American voice. I believe that's all. I'm not so particular about looks, so long as he's neither small nor fat."

"And if you found all that wouldn't you marry it?"

"N-o-o--I don't know--but I'd be engaged a good long time. You see I want to be a belle for years and years."

"And what is to become of the poor men when you are through with them?"

"Oh, they'll get over it. I shall. Why shouldn't they?"

"I thought you said once you wanted to marry a statesman."

"Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't. I'll consider that question ten years hence. I want to be a perfectly famous belle first."

"You are that already."

"Oh, I must have a season in New York, and another in Washington, and another in London. The gods have given me all the gifts, and I intend to make the most of them. Now let's read a chapter of Motley out loud, and if I jump off to other things you jerk me back. Let's finish Pater, though. It's like lying under a cascade of bubbles on a hot summer's day. My brains are addled between trying to be well read and trying to keep four men from proposing. You read aloud, and I'll brush my hair. No, I'll embroider on papa's mouchoir case; I've been at it for thirteen months. Oh, by the bye, I didn't tell you that I had a brilliant idea. It darted into my head just as I was dropping off last night. I forgot to speak about it to papa this morning, but I will to-night. It's this: I'm going to give a ball at Del Monte. Take everybody down on a special train. Don't you think it will be a change? The spring has come so early that we can have the grounds lit up with Chinese lanterns; and there may be some Eastern men there. There often are. So much the better for my ball--and me. Now read."

VII

Trennahan arrived late in the evening, and went directly to the Yorbas' to dinner. He saw Magdaléna alone for a moment before the others came downstairs, and his delight at meeting her again was so boyish that she could hardly have recalled his eventful forty years had she tried. He was one of those men, who, having a great deal of nervous energy, are possessed briefly by the high animal spirits of youth when in unusual mental and physical tenor,--with coincident obliteration of the bills of time. Trennahan was in the highest spirits this evening. He was delighted to get back to California, delighted to see Magdaléna, whom he thought improved and almost pretty in her smart frock. Moreover, no woman had ever seemed to him half so sincere, half so well worth the loving, as this girl who said so little and breathed so much.

Don Roberto and Mr. Polk detained him some time after dinner, and Magdaléna, who thought them most inconsiderate, awaited him in the green-and-brown reception-room. She knew the ugliness of these rooms now, and wondered, as Trennahan finally entered, if it clashed with his sentiment. But he gave no sign. He pushed a small sofa before the fire, drew her beside him, and demanded the history of the past four months. He held her hand and looked at her with boyish delight. Even the lines had left his face for the moment, the grimness his mouth. He looked twenty-six.

"Your trip has done you more good than California did. You never looked so well here."

"I have been funereal since the day I left. This is pure reaction. I never felt so happy in my life. Couldn't we have a walk or ride somewhere to-morrow early--out to the Presidio? I want to be in the open air with you."

"I am afraid we couldn't. Nobody does such things, you know--except Helena. Someone would be sure to see us, and it would be all over town before night. Then we should have to announce--I'd rather not do that until just before--I should hate being discussed."

"Well, but I must have you to myself in my own way. I wonder if your mother would bring you down to my house for a few days. Don Roberto and Mr. Polk could come down every evening."

"I think they would like it."

"And you?"

"Oh, I should like it. The woods must be lovely in winter."

"Who has been teaching you coquetry? Who has fallen in love with you since I left?"

"With me? No one. No one would ever think of such a thing but you--"

"I love you with an unerring instinct."

"They are all in love with Helena. I suppose you heard of her in New York."

"It certainly was not your fault if I did not."

"But surely you must have heard otherwise. She is a great, great belle."

"My dearest girl, you do not hear California mentioned in New York once a month. It might be on Mars. The East remembers California's existence about as often as Europe remembers America's. They don't know what they miss. When am I to see your Helena?"

"A week from to-night; she gives a ball then at Del Monte. She and her father have already gone, because each thought the other needed rest."

"Monterey,--that is the scene of your Ysabel's tragedy. We will explore the old part of the town together."

She moved closer to him, her eyes glistening. "That has been one of my dreams,--to be there with you--for the first time. We can guess where they all lived--and go to the cemetery on the hill where so many are buried--and there is the Custom House on the rocks, where the ball was and where Ysabel jumped off--it will be heaven!"

He laughed and caught her in his arms, kissing her fondly. "You dear little Spanish maid," he said. "You don't belong to the present at all. No wonder you bewitched me. I am beginning to feel quite out of place in the present, myself. It is a novel and delightful sensation."

VIII

Mrs. Yorba decided that it would be wiser for them all to go to Fair Oaks; no one would know whether Trennahan were their guest or not. This was her first really gay winter, and could she have thought of a plausible excuse she would have delayed the marriage for a year or two. But both Don Roberto and Trennahan were determined that the wedding should not take place later than June.

They were to spend five days at Fair Oaks. Then Don Roberto, Mrs. Yorba, and Magdaléna would go to Monterey, Trennahan to follow on the evening of the ball.

The winter woods were wet and glistening. Thick in the brush were the vivid red berries and the firm little snowballs. The air was of a wonderful freshness and fragrance, cool on the cheek, but striking no chill to the blood. The grass tips in the meadows were close and green. There was no haze on the distant mountains: the redwoods stood out sharply; one could almost see the sun baldes crossing in their gloomy aisles. Close to the ground was a low, restless, continuous mutter,--the voluntary of Spring.

Trennahan and Magdaléna rode or strolled in the woods during most of the hours of light. They could not sit on the damp ground, but they swung hammocks by the path-side to sit in when tired. Trennahan would have slept on the verandah had not his enthusiasm for outdoor delights been controlled by his matter-of-fact brain, but he grudged the hours at table, and persuaded Magdaléna to go early to bed that she might rise and go forth at five in the evening of night. After four months of snow and nipping winds and furnace heat, small wonder that he was as happy as a boy out of school, and that he made Magdaléna the most wonderingly happy of women. He did little love-making; he treated her more as a comrade upon whose constant companionship he was dependent for happiness,--his other part, with which he was far better satisfied than with the original measure.

"We will camp out up there during all of July and August," he said to her one morning, as they stood on the edge of the woods and watched the rising sun pick out the redwoods one by one from the black mass on the mountain. "I can't imagine a more enchanting place for a honeymoon than a redwood forest. We'll take a servant, and a lot of books; but I doubt if we shall read much,--we'll shoot and fish all day. If we like it as much as I am sure we shall, we'll build a house there. Do you think you should like it?"

"Oh, I should! I should!"

"You are so sympathetic in your own particular way; not temperamentally so, which is pleasant but means little, but with a slow, sure understanding which goes forth to few people, but is unerring and permanent."

"I love no one but you and Helena. I have never cared to understand anyone else."

"We all have great weaknesses in us. I wonder if mine were ever revealed to you--which God forbid!--if you have sympathy enough to cover those, too."

"I am sure that I have. I am neither quick nor generally affectionate, but I do nothing by halves."

"I believe you. You are the one person on whose mercy I would throw myself. However,--it is a long time since we have spoken of another subject. Do you think no further of writing?"

"I haven't lately. There has been no time. Some day--Oh, yes, I think I should never wholly give it up. Should--should you object?"

"Not in the least. But I am afraid I sha'n't give you much time, either. What were you writing,--your Old-California tales?"

"No,--an--an historical novel--English."

"Of course! And with fresh and fascinating material begging for its turn. I arrived in the nick of time. When you have transcribed those stories into correct and distinguished English, you will have taken your place among the immortals. But style alone will give you a place in letters worth having. Always remember that. The theme determines popular success, the manner rank. Don't misunderstand me; there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly. You must have both. And you are too ambitious, too intellectual, as distinguished from clever, too serious and logical, to be contented with anything short of perfection. I shall be your severest critic; but you yourself will work for years before you produce a line with which you are wholly satisfied. Is not this true?"

"Yes; I should always be my severest critic."

He drew a long breath of relief. He had no desire for a literary wife; nor to be known as the husband of one. Magdaléna should be as happy as he could make her, but the sooner she realised that genius was not her portion, the better.

IX

"Never I think I come to Monterey again," said Don Roberto, as the 'bus which contained his party only drove from the little toy station to the big toy hotel. "Once I hate all the Spanish towns, because so extravagant I am before that I feel 'fraid, si I return, I am all the same like then; but now I am old and the habits fixit; and now I know my moneys go to be safe with Trennahan, I feel more easy in the mind and can enjoy. But I no go to the town, for all is change, I suppose: all the womens grown old and poor, and all the mens dead--by the drink, generalmente. Very fortunate I am I no stay there; meeting Eeram in time. Ay, yi! What kind de house is this? Look like paper, and the grounds so artifeecial. No like much."

Magdaléna hardly knew her father these last months. From the day that he found a reminiscent pleasure in the mild diversions of Menlo he had visibly softened. From the day he was assured of Trennahan he had become almost expansive, and at times was moved to generosity. Upon one occasion he had doubled Magdaléna's allowance, and at Christmas he had given her a hundred dollars; and he had paid the bills of the season without a murmur. The fear which had haunted him during the last thirty years,--that he should suddenly relapse into his native extravagance and squander his patrimony and his accumulated millions, dying as the companions of his youth had died,--he dismissed after he met Trennahan. Polk had been the iron mine to the voracious magnet in his character. In the natural course of things Polk would outlive him; but the possibility of Polk's extermination by railroad accident or small-pox had been a second devil of torment, and during the past year he had visibly failed. Now, however, there was Trennahan to take his place. Don Roberto would enjoy life once more, a second youth. He was almost happy. If he felt his will rotting, he would transfer all his vast interests to Trennahan in trust for his wife and daughter, retaining a large income. He did not believe, at this optimistic period, that there was any real danger, after an inflexible resistance of thirty years; but he also realised for the first time what the strain of those thirty years had been.

Helena, dazzlingly fair in a frock of forest green, and surrounded by five new admirers, three Eastern and two English tourists, awaited Magdaléna on the verandah. The strangers gave Magdaléna a faint shock: being the only well-dressed men she had ever seen except Trennahan, they assumed a family likeness to him, and seemed to steal something of his preeminence among men. She commented distantly on this fact as she went up the stair with Helena.

"Oh, your little tin god on wheels is not the only one," replied Helena, the astute. "There are five here with possibilities besides dress, and more coming to-morrow. They _are_ such a relief! If I feel real wicked to-morrow night--well, never mind!"

"Helena! You will not make those four young men any more miserable than they are now?"

Helena shook her head. She was looking very naughty. "Four months, my dear! I didn't realise what I had endured until I had this sudden vacation. Two days of blissful rest, and then the variations for which I was born."

They were in Helena's room, and Magdaléna sat down by the open window, where she could smell the cypresses, and regarded her beloved friend more critically than was her habit.

"I wonder if you will ever mature,--get any heart?" she said.

"'Léna! What do you mean! Heart? Don't I love you and my father; and the other girls--some?"

"I don't mean that kind. Nor falling in love, either. I never expressed myself very well, but you know what I mean."

"Oh, bother. What were men and women made for but to amuse each other?"

"Life isn't all play."

"It is for a time--when you're young. I am sure that that is what Nature intended, and that the people who don't see it are those who make the mistakes with their lives. Otherwise life would be simply outrageous,--no balance, no compensation. After a certain age even fools become serious: they can't help it, for life begins to take its revenge for permitting them to be young at all, and to hope, and all that sort of thing. Therefore those that don't make the most of youth and all that goes with it are something more than fools."

Magdaléna looked at her in dismay. "How do you realise that, at your age? I have lived alone, thought more--had more time to think and to read--but I never should--"

"I have intuitions. And I've seen more of the world than you have. I see everything that goes on--you can bet your life on that. Talk about my powers of concentration! They're nothing to my antennae."

"But have you no principles of right and wrong? No morality? You would not deliberately sacrifice others to your own pleasure, would you?"

"Wouldn't I? I don't take the least pleasure in cruelty, like some women. If I could give people oblivion draughts, I'd do it in a minute--for my vanity has nothing to do with it, either. But the world is at my feet, and there it shall stay, no matter who pays the piper. I love life. I love everything about it. I've never seen anything in the world I thought ugly. I don't think anything is ugly. If it was, I should hate it. I've never been through a slum,--a horrid slum, that is,--and I don't want to. The beauty of the earth intoxicates me. When I even think about it, much less look at it, I feel perfectly wild with delight to think that I am alive. And my senses are so keen. I see so far. I can hear miles. I believe I can hear the grass grow. I eat and drink little, but that little gives me delight. A glass of cold spring water intoxicates me. And, above all, I enjoy being loved. I never forget how much you and papa love me. I couldn't exist without either of you. Papa is looking much better since he came down. Don't you think so? And I like to see love in the eyes of men I don't care a rap about. Their eyes are like impersonal mirrors for me to read the secrets of the future in. And I don't really hurt them. Most men have a lot of superfluous love in them. I may as well have it as another. It won't interfere with the destination of the reserve in the least."

"Helena!" exclaimed Magdaléna, with a sinking heart. "I believe you are a genius."

"I have the genius of personality, but I couldn't do a thing to save my life."

Magdaléna breathed freely again.

X

Trennahan, who was to have arrived in time to dine with the Belmonts and Yorbas, missed his train and took his dinner alone. Afterward, he saw Magdaléna for a few moments in the Yorbas' private parlour, but she had to dress, and he went off to smoke in the grounds with Don Roberto, Mr. Polk, Mr. Washington, and Colonel Belmont. They subsequently had a game of bowls, and--excepting Colonel Belmont--several cocktails. When they suddenly remembered that a ball was in progress to which they were expected, it was eleven o'clock, and Trennahan was not dressed.

It was Helena's ball, but she had made every man promise to look after the wall-flowers, that she might be at liberty to enjoy herself. Her aunt, Mrs. Yorba, and Magdaléna received with her; and as all the guests had arrived by the same train, and had dressed at about the same time, the arduous duty of receiving was soon over. Helena left the stragglers to her chaperons and prepared to amuse herself. As usual, she had refused to engage herself for any dances, but she gave the first two to her devoted four, then announced her intention to dance no more for the present. The truth was that one of her minute high-heeled slippers pinched, but this she had no intention of acknowledging; if men wished to think her an angel, so they should. She was a sensible person, far too practical to reduce the sum of her happiness by physical discomfort; but the slippers, which she had never tried on, matched her gown, and she had no others with her that did. But the one rift in her lute induced a sympathetic rift in her temper.

The party was very gay and pretty. The rooms had been fantastically decorated with red berries and snowballs, pine, and cedar. The leader of the band was in that stage of intoxication which promised music to make the soles of the dado tingle. All the girls had brought their prettiest frocks, and all the matrons their diamonds. There were no tiaras in the Eighties, but there were a few necklaces, stars, and ear-rings--of the vulgar variety known as "solitaires." It is true that certain of the Fungi looked like crystal chandeliers upon occasion; but Helena would have none of them.

Herself had rarely been more lovely,--in floating clouds of pale pink tulle, which looked like a shower of almond blossoms. Her hair was roped up with pearls, hinting the head-dress of Juliet, but stopping short of eccentric effect. She wore nothing to break the lines of her throat and neck, but on her arms were quantities of odd and beautiful "bangles," many made from her own suggestions, others picked up in different parts of the world.

She was standing opposite the door in the middle of the room as Trennahan entered, leaning lightly upon a little table to rest her mischievous foot. Only one man was beside her at the moment, and Trennahan's view of her was uninterrupted. He knew at once who she was. His second impression was that he had seen few girls so beautiful. His third, that she possessed something more potent than beauty, and that he was responding to it with a certain wild flurry of the senses, and a certain glad exultation in youth and danger which had not been his portion for many a long year. The instinct of the hunter leaped from its tomb, shocked into the eager quivering life of its youth. Trennahan was appalled to hear the fine web he had spun between his senses and his spirit rent in a second, then gratified at the youthful singing in his blood. The old joy in recklessness, in surrender to the delirium of the senses, came back to him. He pushed them roughly aside, and looked about for Magdaléna. She was listening to the rapid delivery of Mr. Rollins. He thought she looked ill, and was about to go to her when Colonel Belmont took him by the arm.

"You must meet my daughter," he said. "Oh, bother! There go half a dozen."

When Trennahan reached Helena, he was presented in the same breath with two other new arrivals, and her slipper was fairly biting. She did not even hear his name. She was in a mood to make her swains unhappy; and she liked Trennahan's face, and what she saw there. There was eager admiration in his eyes and nostrils, and on his face the record of a man who might possibly be her match. Of man's deeper and more personal life she never thought. She had heard that men sometimes loved married women, and others whose like she had never seen; but she hated the mere fact of vice as she did all forms of ugliness, and dismissed it from her mind. She read in Trennahan's face that he had had many flirtations, nothing more.

"I am not going to dance any more to-night," she announced. She placed her hand in Trennahan's arm. "Take me to the conservatory," she said.

There was really nothing for him to do but take her. But it was three hours before either was seen again.

XI

"You are not looking well this morning," said Trennahan, solicitously, about twelve hours after he had appeared in the ball-room. He had just entered the Yorbas' private parlour.

"Neither do you," replied Magdaléna.

"I sat up late with some of the men, and slept ill after."

Magdaléna raised her eyes and looked at him steadily. "You have fallen in love with Helena," she said.

"What nonsense! My dear child, what are you talking about? Miss Belmont asked me to take her to the conservatory; and as I do not dance, and as you do, and as she announced her intention of not dancing again, and is a very entertaining young woman, I decided to remain there. If our engagement had been made known, of course I should have done nothing of the sort. But as it was--"

"You turned white when you first saw her. Alan Rush looked just like that. Now he is mad about her."

"I am not Alan Rush, nor any other boy of twenty-five. The man you have elected to marry, and who is not half good enough for you, as I have told you many times, is a seasoned person past middle age, my dearest. I could not go off my head over a pretty face if I tried. My day for that is long past."

He spoke vehemently.

"You never looked at me like that."

"Doubtless my pallor was due to some such unromantic cause as an extremely bad dinner."

"I have seen that look several times. Alan Rush is not the only one. And Helena is no doll. She has every fascination."

"Possibly. Shall we go for our walk? I am most anxious to see those old houses and graves."

He did not offer to kiss her. She was too proud to take up woman's usual refrain. She put on her hat, and they left the hotel, and walked toward the town.

"I believe the cemetery comes first," she said. "I have made inquiries. We can see the town from there, and go on afterward--if you like."

"Of course I like. How good of you to wait for me! I know you have been longing for the town which I am convinced is a part of your very personality."

"Yes, I have been longing. I don't care much about it this morning."

"Which of your heroines is buried in the cemetery?"

"Benicia Ortega, La Tulita, and some of aunt's old friends."

"You must certainly write those old stories. I often think of them."

"Nothing that you say this morning sounds like the truth."

"My dear girl! I am dull and stupid after a sleepless night. And the night after you left I sat up until two in the morning writing important letters."

"I think it was disloyal of Helena."

"I must rush to her defence. She did not know until the end of the evening who I was. She took me for one of the several Easterners who arrived to-day. Two of them brought letters to her father from Mr. Forbes. One was the son of an old friend. As her father presented me--"

Magdaléna faced about. "And you did not tell her? You did not speak of me?"

"I am going to be perfectly frank, knowing how sensible you are. I had a desperate flirtation with your friend, as desperate and meaningless as those things always are; for it is merely an invention to pass the idler hours of society. There was nothing else to do, so we flirted. It added to the zest to keep her in ignorance of my identity. It was a silly pastime, but better than nothing. I should far rather have been in bed. If I could have talked to you, it would have been quite another matter."

Magdaléna hurried on ahead. He had the tact not to accelerate his own steps. After a time she fell back. She said,--

"What is this 'flirtation,' anyhow? I have heard nothing but 'flirtation' all winter, and I heard a good deal of it last summer. But I have not the slightest idea what it means. What do you do?"

"Do? Oh--I--it is impossible to define flirtation. You must have the instinct to understand. Then you wouldn't ask. Thank Heaven you never will understand. Flirtation is to love-making what soda-water is to champagne. I can think of no better definition than that."

"Did you kiss Helena?"

"Good God, no! That's not flirtation. She is not the sort that would let me if I wished."

"Did you hold her hand?"

"I have held no woman's hand but yours for an incalculable time."

"Did you tell her that you loved her?"

"Certainly not!"

"I must say I can't see how a flirtation differs from an ordinary conversation."

"It only does in that subtle something which cannot be explained."

Magdaléna had an inspiration. "Perhaps you talk with your eyes some."

"Well, you are not altogether wrong. Did you ever see a fencing match? Imagine two invisible personalities dodging and doubling, springing and darting. That will give you some idea. And all without a flutter of passion or real interest. It is good exercise for the lighter wits, but stupid at best." He did not add that the very essence of flirtation is its promise of more to come.

It was some time before Magdaléna spoke again. Then she asked,--

"What did Helena say when you told her your name?"

"I believe she said, 'Great Heaven!'"

"I think this must be the cemetery."

They ascended the rough hill, and pushed their way through weeds and thistles and wild oats to the dilapidated stones under the oaks. Magdaléna had imagined her conflicting emotions when she visited the graves of her youthful heroines; among other things the delightful sense of unreality. But the unreality was of another sort to-day. They were a part of an insignificant past. Trennahan elevated one foot to a massive stone and plucked the "stickers" from his trousers.

"This is all very romantic," he said, "but these confounded things are uncomfortable. Have you found your graves?"

"I think this is Benicia's. We can go if you like."

"By no means." He went and leaned over the sunken grey stone which recorded the legend of Benicia Ortega's brief life and tragic death, then insisted upon finding the others.

"You don't take any interest," said Magdaléna. "Why do you pretend?"

He caught her in his arms and seated her on the highest and driest of the tombs, then sat beside her. He kept his arm about her, but he did not kiss her. "Come now," he said, "let us have it out. We must not quarrel. I humble myself to the dust. I vow to be a saint. I will not exchange two consecutive sentences with your friend in the future. Make me promise all sorts of things."

"If you love her, you can't help yourself."

"I have no intention of loving her. Perhaps you will be as sweet and sensible as you always are, and not say anything so absurd again. I am deeply sorry that I have offended you. Will you believe that? And will you forgive me?"

"Do you mean that you still wish to marry me?"

"Great Heaven, 'Léna! Even if my head were turned, do you think that I have not brains enough to remember that that sort of thing is a matter of the hour only, and that I am a man of honour? I have no less intention of marrying you to-day than I had yesterday. Does that satisfy you? And--since you take it so hardly--I wish I might never see Miss Belmont again."

Magdaléna raised her eyes; they were full of tears. Her hat was pushed back, her soft hair ruffled. In the deep shade of the oaks and with the passion in her face she looked prettier than he had ever seen her. A kiss sprang to her lips. He bent his head swiftly and caught it; and then he was delighted at the depth of his penitence.

* * * * *

"'Léna, you ought to hate me, but I didn't know! I swear I didn't!"

"I know you did not. He told me that it was entirely his fault, and I have forgiven him; so don't let us say any more about it."

"Well, I am glad he admitted that. I'm pretty selfish, as I've never denied, but I'd never be disloyal. Not to you, anyhow," she added on second thoughts. "I shouldn't mind Ila so much, nor Caro."

"You don't mean to say you would take any girl's lover away from her, Helena?"

"Yes, I would if I wanted him badly. But I'd do it right out before her face. I'd never be underhand about it. I loathe deceit. I was furious for a time with Mr. Trennahan last night, but I really believe I was more furious because he was the most interesting man I had ever met and I couldn't have him, than because he hadn't behaved quite properly."

Magdaléna reached her right hand to a bow on her left shoulder, that Helena should not see the sudden leap of her heart. "Do you mean to say that you had--had intended to--to--add him to the quartette?"

"I had had a very definite idea of turning the entire quartette out in his favour. I don't mind telling you that, because wild horses couldn't make me so much as flirt an eyelash at him again; and of course it was only one of my passing fancies. Nothing goes very deep with me. I'm made on a magnificent plan. So is he. We'll both have forgotten last evening before the end of the week. I hate the morning after a ball, don't you? One always feels so devitalised. Wasn't Ila's gown disgracefully low? And the way some girls roll their eyes is positively sickening. Let's go out and get a breath of air."

XII

Two nights later Tiny had a large dinner. A place had been kept for Trennahan. He had expected to be sent in with Magdaléna,--somewhat illogically, as no one suspected his engagement. He was sent in with Helena.

The long low dining-room of the old house on Rincon Hill had never been double-dated with gas fixtures. There was a large candelabra against the dark wainscot at each end of the room, and little clusters of flame on the table. The girls never looked so pretty, so guileless, never planted their arrows so surely, as in this room, in the soft radiance of its wax candles.

On Helena's other side sat Rollins, whom she honoured by regarding as a brother. On Trennahan's left Ila was intent upon the subjugation of a younger brother of Mr. Washington, who had recently returned to San Francisco after six years in Europe, and had knelt at her shrine at once. He was wealthy, and she had made up her mind to marry him. Trennahan she had given up during the summer. Had she not, she would have known better than to pit her charms against Helena's. Magdaléna was on the same side of the table.

Helena wore white, in which she looked her best; the silk softened with much lace on the bust. She raised her eyes defiantly to Trennahan's. Their coquetry had been ordered to the rear.

"We've got to talk, or look like idiots," she said. "I had made up my mind never to speak to you again. I think you were quite too horrid the other night."

"I certainly was."

"Was it your fault or mine?"

"Wholly mine--despite your fascinations."

"I wouldn't have been fascinating if I had known. I am glad you admit that it was all your fault. It makes me believe that it was. What made you keep it up for three hours?"

"The weakness of man."

"Is that what you told 'Léna?"

"No; it is not."

"What did you tell her--Oh, how horrid of me to ask! Let's talk about something else. Do you like California better than New York?"

"It will take exactly eight minutes to exhaust that subject; I am an old hand at it. So while I assure you that I do, and am giving my reasons, please cast about for a subject to follow."

"My thinker is not good to-night. I expect you to take care of me."

"What greater delight! You are paler than you were. Are you not well?"

Trennahan's voice became tender from long habit. The softness and fire sprang to Helena's eyes. The pink tide poured into her cheeks. A sudden intense light sprang into Trennahan's eyes. It held hers for the fraction of a moment, then both looked away; and ate their oysters.

It was Helena who spoke first. "Another moment, and we should have been launched into the second chapter. But we are not to flirt; we understand that thoroughly. I don't think, on second thoughts, that I should like you at all. You have yourself too well in hand; you look as if you had been through it all too many times; there isn't a bit of freshness about you--Oh, bother, I hate lying! I'll tell you plainly and have done with it,--I should be in love with you by this time if it were not for 'Léna. That's not the way of older climes, but it's mine: I've got to talk out or die. I've always said everything that occurred to me. Let's talk this out, and then we'll never talk for two minutes alone again. If you had not been in love with 'Léna, should you be in love with me by this time?"

He put his fork down abruptly and turned to her. She shrank a little. "I think we had better let that subject alone. As a product of older climes, I am competent to judge."

"I must know. I will know. Tell me."

"Well, then, I should."

"As much as you are with 'Léna?"

"I should have been madder about you than I have been about any woman for fifteen years."

"If you know that, how can you help it now?"

"There is such a thing as honour in men."

"That means that there is none in women? Well, I don't believe there is. But honour does not keep a man from loving a woman."

He made no reply.

"Does it?"

"Are you mad about fire? Or is it your vanity that is insatiable?"

Again he met her eyes. And this time her face was as white as her gown. Her bosom was heaving. Her skin was translucent. To Trennahan's suffused vision she seemed bathed in white fire.

"I love you," he said hoarsely; "and I would give all the soul I've got to have met you a year ago."

XIII

Talk about the complex heart of a woman. It is nothing to that of a man.

Trennahan had loved a good many women in a good many ways. Perhaps he understood women as well as any man of his day: he had been bred by women of the world, and his errant fancy had occasionally sent him into other strata. He also thought that he knew himself. His mind, his heart, his senses, the best and the worst in him, had been engaged so often and so actively that he could have drawn diagrams of each, alone or in combination, with accommodating types of woman. He also, without generalising too freely, knew men, and he had spent ten years of his life in diplomacy. But he now stood before himself as puzzled as he was aghast.

If his grip upon himself had suddenly relaxed, and he had spent a wild night with the wild young men of San Francisco, he should not have been particularly surprised: he had been living on an exalted plane for the last ten months. But that he loved Magdaléna with the love of his life, that he realised in her some vague youthful ideal, that she was the woman created for the better part of him, that his highest happiness was to be found in her, he had never doubted from the minute he had finished his long communion with himself and determined to marry her. And every moment he had spent with her had strengthened the tie. Nothing about her but had pleased him: her intellect, her pride, her reticence, her difference from other women; even, after the first shock to his taste was over, her lack of beauty. It was true that she had no great power over his pulses, but he was tired of his pulses. She appealed to his tenderness and deeper affections as no woman had done. Above all, she had given him peace of mind; and she held his future in her hands.

And now?

Helena Belmont was that most dangerous rival of other women,--a girl whom men loved desperately with no attendant loss of self-respect. Whatever their passion, they felt a keen personal delight in the purity of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated her cleverness. She was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she gave even these prosaic San Francisco youths vague promptings to distinguish themselves by some great and noble action, sending her shafts straight through the American brain to those dumb inherited instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediæval ancestors. Her very selfishness--which she was pleased to call Paganism--charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser women. No man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. As the reader knows, there was nothing ideal about Helena. Even her fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. She was a most practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own way as long as she lived. The wealth and petting and adulation which had surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her, albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive, generous, and kind--in her own way. Naturally the men for whom her lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into smiles, thought her nothing short of a goddess, and were moved to inarticulate rhyme.

* * * * *

Trennahan had met many more women who were beautiful, seductive, dashing, and withal fastidious, than had these young men of a cosmopolitan and still chaotic State; nevertheless, he might have been Adam ranging the dreary solitudes of Paradise, facing about for the first time upon the first woman. Helena was the type of woman for whom such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly favoured one so much of a man apart from a type, looking down upon that type with pitying scorn. This is a mere matter of fascination, too subtle, and composed of too many parts for man's analysis, but it is the most telling force in the clashing of the sexes.

Trennahan was an extremely practical man. He called things by their right names, and scorned to turn his head aside when life or himself was to be looked squarely in the eye. It is true that he cursed himself for a fool. He was neither in his youth nor in his dotage; he was in that long intermediate period where a man may hope that his will and sound common-sense are in their prime,--the interval of the minimum of mistakes. Nevertheless, he was as madly in love with Helena Belmont as was the first man with the first woman, as a boy with his first mistress, an old man with his last. He admitted the fact and ordered his brain to make the best of the situation.

He was not conscious of any change in his feelings for Magdaléna except that he no longer desired to marry her. The sense of rest, of comradeship, the tenderness and affection, had not abated. He was just as sure that she was the woman for him to marry as he had been two weeks ago; and he knew that he could not make a greater mistake than to marry Helena Belmont. He believed that it would be years before she would be capable of loving any man for any length of time. Such women not only develop slowly, but they have too much to give, men too little. The clever woman is abnormal in any case, being a divergence from the original destiny of her sex. The woman who is beautiful, fascinating, passionate, and clever is a development with which man has not kept pace.

He spent the greater part of the three days following the dinner, on the cliffs beyond the Golden Gate. There was no great moral battle going on in his mind; he intended to marry Magdaléna. One of his pet theories was that one secret of the rottenness underlying the social, and in natural sequence, the political structure of the United States was the absence of a convention. Men were on their knees to women so long as their pleasure was materially abetted by the attitude; but the moment the motive ceased to exist, any display of chivalry toward her would be as useless and wasted as toward the ordinary run of women. It is always the woman of the moment, never woman in general. The so-called chivalry of American men does not exist; the misconception has arisen out of the multitudinous examples of American subserviency to the individual woman,--which is part of a habit of exaggeration natural to a youthful nation. There is an utter absence of all responsibility that is not the concomitant of personal desire.

The new country is full of good impulses with little to bind them together. Children respect their parents if they feel like it, just as they are polite when in a responsive mood, not through any sense of convention. The American press is an exemplification of this absence of _noblesse oblige_, and more particularly in its treatment of women. Even when not moved by personal jealousy or spite, the total lack of respect with which the American press treats women who have not in any way challenged public opinion--society women with whom the public has no concern, women upon whom either the misfortune of circumstances or of a powerful individuality has fallen--is the most significant foreboding of the degeneration of a national character while yet half grown. It is individualism, which is a polite term for rampant selfishness, run mad, a fussy contempt and hatred for the traditions of older nations.

Fifty years ago, when the United States was still so old-fashioned as to be hardly "American," it was more or less bound together by the conventions it had inherited from the great civilisations that begat it. These conventions exist to-day only in men of the highest breeding, those with six or eight generations behind them of refinement, consequence, and fastidiousness in association. In these men, the representatives of an aristocracy that is in danger of being crippled and perhaps swamped by plutocracy, exists the convention which forces the most deplorable degenerate of old-world aristocracy to manifest himself a gentleman in every crucial test. So thoroughly did Trennahan comprehend these facts, so profound was his contempt for the second-rate men of his country, that he was almost self-conscious about his honour. He would no more have asked Magdaléna to release him, nor have adopted the still more contemptible method of forcing her to break the engagement, than he would have been the ruin of an ignorant girl. But he would have sacrificed every green blade in his soul to have met Helena Belmont a year ago, and would have taken the chances with defiance and the consequences without a murmur.

To marry Magdaléna in June was impossible. That he should ever cease to desire Helena Belmont, to regret the very complete happiness which might have been his for a few years, was a matter of doubt,--with even possibilities. But there must be a long intermission before he could marry another woman. His determination to leave California for a year was fixed, but what excuse to offer Don Roberto and Magdaléna was the question which beset him in all his waking hours and amid all his torments.

During these three days he avoided seeing Magdaléna alone. On the afternoon of the fourth day he came face to face with Helena Belmont in the Mercantile Library.

She was leaving as he entered. They looked at each other for a moment, then without a word both walked toward a room at the right of the door.

This was a long narrow apartment leading off the great room, and was darker, dustier, gloomier, grimmer. As the building stood almost against another of equal height, its side windows looked upon blank walls; but some measure of grey light was coaxed down from the narrow strip above by means of reflectors. The walls were lined with old books bound in calf black with age, and in the centre was a long narrow table which looked as if it should have a coffin on it. This room had depressed many cheerful lovers in its time; it was enough to drive tormented souls to suicide.

Trennahan and Helena sat down in an angle where they were least likely to be seen.

"What are you going to do?" asked Helena.

"I am going away for a year as soon as I can invent a decent excuse."

"Then shall you come back and marry 'Léna?"

"Yes."

"Suppose you still love me?"

"It will make no difference. And Time works wonders. You will have quite forgotten me."

"I sincerely hope I shall." Her voice shook. There was agitation in every curve of her figure. But had anyone entered, their faces could not have been distinguished two feet away. The sky was grey. There was no light to reflect.

"It is the first time I haven't got what I wanted," she said ingenuously.

"It will make your next triumph the keener. I shall be glad to serve as a shadow for the high lights."

"I have suffered horribly in the last week."

"So have I, if that consoles you. But I have had a good deal of suffering in my life, one way and another, and I shall weather it. I wish I could take your share."

"Shouldn't you like to marry me?"

"Of course I should. Why do you ask such foolish questions?"

"I want to talk it all out. I love 'Léna, but I don't love her better than I do myself, and I don't see why I should suffer instead of she. Don't you think that if we told her she would release you?"

"Undoubtedly; but I shall not ask her. Nor must you think of such a thing. Why two young and exceptionally fortunate girls should want what is left of me God only knows; but if they do the prior rights must win the day. If I don't marry 'Léna, I shall marry no woman,--not even you."

She gave him a swift glance. His face was not as stern as his words. "You know that you would," she said with decision. "You are too honourable to break the engagement, but you would marry me if it were broken for you."

He drew his brows together and bent his face to hers. "Listen to me," he said. "I mean what I say. I love you,--how much you have not the vaguest idea; but I will not have her happiness ruined. If you ask her to break the engagement, I shall never see you again. Will you remember that?"

"I suppose you are right. I had not really thought of asking her. But I've got to tell her that I love you. I feel like a hideous hypocrite. I can hardly look her in the face. I'll promise not to betray you, but I must tell her that. She has been so sweet to me this last week, ever since that night at Monterey. She's the very best creature that ever lived. Then I'll ask papa to take me away. You need not go."

"I shall go. Can't you go away without saying anything to her about it? I don't see why her peace of mind should be disturbed."

"I should feel just as guilty when I came back."

"You would have forgotten it by that time."

"Oh, no; I shouldn't! I shouldn't!"

There was no mistaking the passion in her voice. Trennahan half rose, but sat down again. "I would rather you wrote it to her after you left," he said. "Then there would be no danger of saying too much. If you want to go to Europe, I will go to the South Sea Islands."

"Well, I will arrange it that way, if you like."

Her head was lowered. She spoke dejectedly. There was little of the old Helena manifest. In truth, she had been making a mighty effort to control herself for the first time in her life. She hardly knew whether she wished to do what was right or not; for the moment she was dominated by a stronger will than her own. She drew a deep sigh. "I wish I could take it as coolly as you do," she said.

"I take it less coolly. But I am older and used to self-control."

"I hate self-control."

"So do I."

"I feel as if life were quite over. I would a great deal rather die than not. I wish I were older. I don't know what to do. I feel that it cannot be right to throw away the happiness of one's life, but I don't know how to hold you, and, above all, I don't want to hurt 'Léna. I thought that I knew so much; but I know nothing at all--nothing."

"If you do what is right, you will be very glad a year hence."

"A year is such a long time." Her head dropped lower. She looked utterly dejected. In a moment she put her handkerchief to her face and cried silently. The undemonstrativeness of the act, so unlike her usual volcanic energy, touched him out of prudence. He put his arm about her and pressed her head against his shoulder. In a moment he laid his face against hers and closed his eyes to crowd back the tears that sprang from the depths of his soul. When he opened his eyes, it was to meet those of Magdaléna.

XIV

She had left them without a word, and Trennahan did not see her until the following evening, when she sent for him.

She received him in the room at the end of the hall, where they were sure not to be interrupted. As he entered he averted his face hastily, and cursed himself for a scoundrel. But he went straight to the point.

"I have made you suffer," he said, "and as only you can suffer. I have no excuse to offer except my own weakness. Do you remember that I asked you once if you thought you could love me did you come to understand all the weakness of my nature, and that you replied you could? Will you forgive me this display of it? I have no desire--no intention of marrying any other woman."

"I have not doubted your honour. But I shall not marry you. I do not want you without your love. I see now that I never had it."

"You did, and you have it still. It is impossible for a man to explain himself to a woman. Will you let me decide for both? I am going away for a time. When I return I want you to marry me."

She shook her head. "There would be three people miserable instead of one. If I had not gone there yesterday, perhaps I should never have known: I simply made up my mind after that night at Monterey that I would think no more about it. By and by you might have got over it and we might have been happy in a way--I don't know. It is not your fault that I found out. And I went to the Library by the merest chance yesterday. It seems like fate, and I shall recognise it. If Helena did not love you, it would be different; but I had a terrible scene with her last night. I never thought even she could feel so. For the time I felt much sorrier for her than for myself--I felt rather dull, for that matter. After she went I thought all night. It was a terrible night." She stopped and shivered.

He took her hand, but she withdrew it. "I thought of everything. You know I once told you that my only religion was to do what I believed to be right. If love means anything, it means that one should make the other person happy, not oneself. I thought and thought. You two were more to me than any people living. I have not ever really loved anyone else, except my aunt, and her not half so much as Helena. Therefore my love would not be worth much if I did not consider you two before myself. If Helena did not love you, it would be different. I would try to forget that she had fascinated you, and I should see no reason why I should not marry you if you still wished me to. But she loves you. I never expected to see such tragedy. But even if I did not believe she would make you happy, I would not give you to her, for I vowed to live for that--long before the night at Tiny's--in the garden. But Helena could make any man happy. She has everything."

She paused again. He made no reply for a moment. He was staring at the carpet, at a hideous green-and-yellow dragon. The comedy which cuts every black cloud in thin staccato blades was suggesting that he had something to be grateful for, inasmuch as the scene with Helena had been spared himself.

"You are far more suited to me than she is," he said finally. "I am too old for her. I am not for you. If we have souls, yours and mine were made for each other. Years have nothing to do with us. They would mean everything between Helena and myself."

She leaned forward and fixed her eyes on his, compelling his gaze.

"If you had never met me, would you not be engaged to Helena by this time?"

"Doubtless, but that proves nothing."

"Will you give me your word of honour that you do not wish you were free, that you would not gladly marry her now?"

He drew a long breath. He felt like a prisoner on the witness stand driven to save himself by incrimination of another. But he was in that state of mind when only the truth is possible.

"I will put it in another way. Do you want anything in the world as much as Helena?"

"No," he said; "I do not."

She got up and walked to the window, and drew aside the curtains. The sky was brilliant with moon and stars; the bay and hills lovely with the mystery of night. California had never been more unsympathetically beautiful. She jerked the curtains together and went back to him. As she did not sit down, he rose.

"That is all," she said, "except that you must let me explain to my father."

"And let you bear the whole brunt of it. Not if I know myself."

"You must. I understand him, and you do not. Besides, if he knew that you and Helena had anything to do with the breaking of the engagement he would never let me speak to either of you again, and I have no other friends. I shall tell him that I no longer wish to marry you, and he cannot compel me to give reasons. If he speaks to you about it, you must tell him that you will marry no woman against her will, and let him see that you mean it."

"Magdaléna, you are a grand woman."

"I am a very dull and stupid person who has made up her mind that the only chance of making life bearable is to do what is right. I am terribly commonplace. I wonder you stood me as long as you did."

"You are the reverse of stupid and commonplace; and I am by no means sure that you are doing right. I, too, have thought over this matter, for nearly as many days as you have hours. I have tried to get outside myself, to view the case quite dispassionately; and I honestly believe that--as you insist upon putting me before yourself--it would be better for me to marry you than Helena."

"I do not believe it. Nor could I marry you after what you just acknowledged. I have never had much pride with you, but I have that much. Marry you when you said that you wanted nothing so much in the world as to marry Helena Belmont? That was the end of everything."

He left the room and the house. Magdaléna went up the stair slowly, assisting herself with the banister. Her limbs felt as if their muscles had fallen to dust. Her heart seemed to have taken it outside of herself altogether; there was no sensation where sensation was supposed to sit, unless it were that of vacancy. Her brain was not confused; she did not feel in the least as if she were going to be ill. She knew what she had done, what she had to do in the future; and she wished that her heavy limbs were as dead as that something within her for which she had no name.

XV

The next morning she received a note from Trennahan.

I am sailing for Honolulu. Do nothing until my return. I shall be gone six weeks. Until your final decision I shall consider myself bound to you. And, I repeat, I think it best that we should marry. You have acted on impulse, and your mind and judgment were constructed to work slowly. And God knows this is not a matter to be decided in haste. I shall have sailed before even a telegram from you could reach me. Don Roberto knows that I have thought more than once of a trip to the Islands. Tell him when he returns that I suddenly decided to go. J. T.

But Magdaléna wanted no respite. It was her temper to die once rather than a thousand times. Her father was in Sacramento on business. He would return the following day. She was too dull and listless to feel fear of him, but she wanted it over.

She wrote at once to Helena, enclosing Trennahan's letter: "I have made up my mind, and that is the end of it. As far as I am concerned, he now belongs to you. I shall speak to papa to-morrow night. Immediately after I shall write to Mr. Trennahan, and that will put an end to my part in the matter."

Helena ordered her devoted parent to take her to Southern California at once. To pick up the old routine, to show herself daily and nightly in the studied simulacrum of her former self, was no part of her code. She felt she should tell every man that came near her that she hated him, and the reason why. Nor was hers the temperament for suspense without diversion. She could live through the next six weeks with change of scene, but not otherwise. She made a full confession to her father and received the severest reprimand of her life; but Colonel Belmont took her to Southern California.

Magdaléna went to a lunch-party on the day following Trennahan's departure and paid calls during the afternoon. The small details diverted her, and she found herself able to make conversation, despite the sluggish current of misery beneath. She had told her mother of her determination not to marry Trennahan; and although Mrs. Yorba had paced the room in apprehension of her husband's wrath, she was secretly pleased. A daughter, particularly one that gave no trouble, was companionable and useful, and she saw no reason why she should be asked to give her to any man for years to come. Although meagre, she was not heartless, and was much relieved that Magdaléna appeared indifferent to the sudden break. She was dimly conscious that she did not understand her daughter, but she had no desire to plumb the depths; she had a substantial distaste for the Spanish nature when roused.

Her husband was expected to return in time for dinner. She went to bed with an attack of neuralgia a little after six.

Magdaléna did not see her father until he entered the dining-room with her uncle. He inquired immediately for Trennahan, who usually dined with him when there were no engagements elsewhere.

"He decided suddenly to go to the Sandwich Islands and sailed yesterday."

"Very sorry he no wait until I come back. I think I gone with him. Always I want to see the Islands. I work long enough now: go to travel some and see the world. So queer to think is so much world outside California. When you go to Europe, I go too. And you, too, Eeram. You no can go with us, for both cannot leave the bank, but when we coming back you take the vacation, too."

"I never expect to see the outside of California again," said Mr. Polk, shortly.

Magdaléna's nerves shook for the first time in seventy-two hours. She appreciated the ordeal she had to face within the next. The dull ache in every nerve of her gave place to a certain keenness of apprehension. What would that terrible little man do? She had absorbed something of her father's personality as a child. During the last year she had talked much with him and had discovered the strange weaknesses and fears which lurked in that manufactured character. She fully realised what a son-in-law like Trennahan meant to him. He was quite capable of killing her. And during the last three or four weeks he had flown into more than one violent passion, prompted by a liver disordered by too much dining out.

While the two men were drinking their coffee, she left the room and went to the office. The riding-whip was in its old place; on a shelf in the cupboard was a brace of pistols. Magdaléna threw the whip into the cupboard, locked the door, and slipped the key behind a book on the mantel. Her father came in a moment later. She handed him a cigar and a match. He drew his heavy brows together and puckered his eyelids.

"What the matter?" he demanded drily. "So white you are, and the hand tremble."

Magdaléna sat down and took control of herself.

"I am not going to marry Mr. Trennahan," she said.

She held her breath for the expected outburst; but Don Roberto only stared at her, his eyes slowly expanding. The cigar dropped from his fingers.

"He no want marry you?" he ejaculated finally.

"I told him that I did not wish to marry him,--I never wish to marry any man,--and he is too proud to insist upon marrying a woman who does not want him. We had a long conversation. We quite understand each other. He will never ask me again."

"_Dios!_" gasped Don Roberto. "_Dios!_" But there was no anger in his voice. His eyes rolled from Magdaléna to the window and back again. Finally he said,--

"He no come back, then?"

"He is coming back in six weeks."

Don Roberto drew a long breath and seemed to recover himself.

"Then si he no break the engagement, he feel glad si it is make again. You marry him the day after he come back. I fixit that."

"No power on earth can make me marry him."

Her father searched her countenance. He knew her character. Did it not have that iron of New England in it for which he would have sold his birthright? He might turn her into the street, and it would avail him nothing. Again his features relaxed, this time not with surprise and consternation, but with abject fear. He shuddered from head to foot; then his hands shot up to receive his face. He groaned and rocked from side to side.

Magdaléna was aghast. What feeling was alive in her united in filial tenderness. She went to him and put her hands uncertainly about his head, then stroked his hair awkwardly: she was little used to endearments.

"I never thought--" she stammered. "I never thought--"

"Thirty years I work like the slave, and now all going! Eeram, he have the death-tick in him: I hear! And now I no go to have the son, and I go to die in the streets like the others; with no one cents! _Ay! yi! ay! yi!_"

Magdaléna was pricked with a new fear: Was her father insane? She had heard of the "fixed idea." This weevil had been burrowing in his brain for more than a quarter of a century. She went back to her chair and said assertively,--

"You are one of the ablest financiers in California: everybody says so. Nothing can change that, whether uncle dies or not. This is all a fancy of yours. You don't half appreciate yourself. And you are tired out to-night, and have not been well lately--"

"All going! All going! _Ay de mi! Ay de mi!_ Why I no dying with the wife and the little boy? Make myself over, and now the screws go to drop out my character, and I am like before."

Magdaléna had an inspiration. "Take me into the bank," she said eagerly. "Teach me everything. I am sure I can learn. Then I will look after everything when uncle dies. I want to work--"

Don Roberto dropped his hands and gave a low roar. "The women all fools, and you the more big fool I never see. You throw way the clever man like he is old hat, and think you can manage the bank! _Madre de Dios!_ Si I no feel like old clothes, no more, I beating you. To-morrow I do it." His eyes kindled at the prospect. "To-morrow si you no say you marry Trennahan, I beating you till you are black like my hat."

What remained of Magdaléna's apathy left her then. She stood up and faced him, drawing her heavy brows together after his own fashion. "You will never beat me again," she said. "Let us have an understanding on that subject before we go to bed to-night. I am your daughter, and I shall always obey you except where the question of my marrying is concerned. But if you ill-treat me I shall leave your house and not return. I am of age, and I have my aunt to go to. Now, unless _you_ promise _me_ that you will never raise your hand to me again, I will leave for Santa Barbara to-night."

Again Don Roberto stared at her. But his surprise passed quickly. He was too shrewd a judge of human nature to doubt her. If she had inherited the iron of her mother's ancestors, she had also inherited the pride of the Yorbas: she would not permit her womanhood to be outraged. But he could have his revenge in other ways; and he would take it. He gave the promise and ordered her sullenly to send the butler to help him up to bed.

XVI

During the following week Don Roberto was very ill. The doctor came three times a day. Mrs. Yorba and Magdaléna sat up on alternate nights. Mr. Polk was constantly at the bedside. When he retired to snatch an hour's sleep, Don Roberto's temperature became alarming; of the presence of his wife and daughter he took no notice whatever.

As the ego must enter into all things, Magdaléna, despite her alarm and pity, was grateful for the diversion. The interview with her father had roused her abruptly and finally; and during that night her misery had raged in every part of her. It is true that in the long watches thought fairly stamped in her brain, but it was rudely brushed aside every little while by the imperious wants of the sick man, or the whispered remarks of the professional nurse. At other times she slept heavily or received the numerous friends who came to inquire for the eminent citizen who had dined out too often during the gayest season in many years.

Don Roberto recovered, and his convalescence was as memorable as his previous social activity. No nurse would remain more than thirty-six hours at any price; and even his wife, whose ideas of marital duty were as rigid as her social code, lost her patience upon one occasion and rated him soundly. Mr. Polk was the only person he treated with common decency. As for Magdaléna, he might have been a sultan and she his meanest slave. But Magdaléna was rather pleased than otherwise. Her conscience had flagellated her as the immediate cause of his illness, and she strove by every act of devotion to make amends.

As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he was taken, in a special car, to Fair Oaks, to absorb the sun on his spacious verandahs. Magdaléna had asked the doctor to order Southern California, but the order had been received with such a roar of fury that the subject was not resumed. Magdaléna was forced to return to Menlo Park.

She spent the night walking the floor of her room, struggling for endurance to face the places eloquent of Trennahan. There were so many of them! Helena simply would not have returned; no power short of physical force could have compelled her. More than once Magdaléna wished that she was cast in her friend's anarchic mould. She felt that did her grip upon herself relax she should scream aloud and grovel on the very boards that had had their share in her brief love-life. But she was Magdaléna Yorba, the proudest woman in California; in the very hour of her discovery, when she had been possessed of a blind terror rather than grief, she had remembered to be thankful that the world could not pity her. Even the genuine sympathy of Tiny would have been gall in a raw wound. She was looking thinner and plainer than ever, but her father's illness would account for that. She must set her features in steel and lock them, keep her emotions for the night.

The next day she visited every spot associated with Trennahan,--not once, but many times. She had made up her mind with the right instinct that the thing to do was to blunt her sensibilities. By the third day she had ordered the earlier associations on duty, and managed to confuse them somewhat with those which had held possession for so brief a time. She was determined to succeed. She had no right to love the husband of another woman, and suffering was something so much more terrible than anything her imagination had ever hinted that she was frantic to get rid of the load as quickly as possible. By and by she would go back to her writing; and that, and her duties, should be every bit of her life henceforth.

At the end of a week she discovered that she was still receptive to the æsthetic delights. It was early spring. The soft air caressed the senses, perfumed with violet and lilac, Castilian roses, new clover, and the breath of mountain forests, brought on the long sighs of the wind. Never was there such a _bouquet_ since Time began. Over a high bush on the lawn opposite her window the long "bridal wreaths" tumbled. The meadows were full of mustard, the bright green leaves hardly visible, so thick were the yellow blossoms.

Once she rode to the foot-hills, escorted by Dick. They were covered with yellow and purple lupins, miniature jungles which harboured nothing more sanguinary than the gopher and the cotton-tail. The tawny poppies had hills all to themselves, a blaze of colour as fiery as the sun to which they lifted their curved drowsy lips. The Mariposa lilies grew by the creeks, in the dark shade of meeting willows. The gold-green moss was like plush on the trees. From the hills the great valley looked like a dense forest out of which lifted the tower of an enchanted castle. Not another signal of man was to be seen, nothing but the excrescence on the big wedding-cake house of a Bonanza king. Beyond the hills rose the slopes of the mountains, with their mighty redwoods, their dark untrodden aisles, their vast primeval silences. Magdaléna was thankful that Nature had not ceased to be beautiful, and pressed her hands against her heart to stifle its demand; Nature commands union, and has no sympathy for aching solitude.

Meanwhile Don Roberto was recovering rapidly. From the hour that he could walk briskly about the garden his voluble irascibility left him, and he reverted to something more than his old taciturnity; he rarely opened his mouth except to put the plainest of food into it, even to speak to Mr. Polk. His brows were lowered constantly over heavy brooding eyes; his lips seemed set with a spring. When he finally addressed his wife, it was to tell her that she must manage with one butler and one housemaid. Coincidently he dismissed two of the gardeners and commanded the one retained, and Dick, to plant in a part of the lawns that there might be less water used. Himself came from town every evening and worked in the garden for two hours, besides arising at five in the morning and working until breakfast. He sold his finest carriage horses to Mr. Geary; and when one of the two remaining was temporarily disabled, he rode to and from the station in the spring wagon. The monthly allowance of his wife and daughter was suspended for the summer.

Mrs. Yorba, tall, garbed in black, stalked about the house with the expression of an outraged empress; Magdaléna, being the cause of the outrage, was rarely addressed. She ostentatiously made over several of her old frocks and coldly requested her daughter to make her own bed. She kept all the windows in the house, with the exception of one in each room, closed and shuttered, as she was deprived of both service and water. The house seemed perpetually expectant of funeral guests, its silence only broken by Mrs. Yorba's heavy sighs.

Magdaléna had certainly succeeded in making three people miserable; she could only hope that she had been more fortunate with the other two. She spent most of her time out of doors, riding or walking until her strength was exhausted. She was profoundly grateful that she was to take little part in the socialities of the summer. To dance and picnic and tennis and ride to the hills, exactly as she had done when quite another person! She infinitely preferred the disapproval of her parents and the freedom they gave her.

XVII

Trennahan had written to Magdaléna from the Islands, acknowledging the letter she had written him after her interview with her father, and accepting his dismissal. He returned to San Francisco the last of May. Almost immediately she received a letter from Helena announcing her engagement to him.

Helena, while in Southern California, had written to Magdaléna with her accustomed regularity. The letters were bitter with self-reproach alternated with the very joy of being alive in that opulent southern land. When she wrote of the engagement she assured the dearest friend she had on earth that if things had turned out differently she should have gone away and got over it somehow, but as Magdaléna's decision was irrevocable she intended to be the happiest girl in the world; it wouldn't do anybody a bit of good if she wasn't. Magdaléna felt no bitterness toward her. She had lost Trennahan; the woman mattered nothing. She would rather it were Helena than another; for who else could make him so happy? But she knew that she should see less of Helena in the future, and she hardly knew whether she were glad or sorry. She wished that she had the courage to ask her to keep him away from Menlo Park this summer.

The other girls moved down, bringing many guests, and she saw them daily; habit is not broken in a moment. They passed through Fair Oaks as usual on their afternoon drives, stopping for a chat; in their char-à-bancs or on the verandah. It was some time before they discovered the changes in the Yorba household, and when they did they merely shrugged their shoulders at the old don's eccentricities. The big parlours were certainly to be regretted; but there were other parlours that were not half bad, and it was terribly up-hill work entertaining Don Roberto. They were profoundly sorry for Magdaléna, and were so insistent in their demands that she should spend much of her time with them that she found her solitude far less complete than she had hoped. But Helena and Trennahan were not to come down until the first of July; they had gone with Colonel Belmont to the Yosemite, Geysers and Big Trees.

XVIII

Trennahan in that first month thought little of Magdaléna. He hardly knew whether he were happy or not; he certainly was intoxicated. Helena was both impassioned and shy, a companion to whom words were hardly a necessary medium for thought, and magnificently uncertain of mood. Moreover, whether riding a donkey up the steep dusty grades of the Yosemite, or half veiled in a mist of steam, reeking of Hell, or standing with wondering eyes and parted lips among the colossal trees of Calaveras, she was always beautiful. And Trennahan worshipped her beauty with the strength of a passion which had sprung from a long and recuperative sleep. That he was twice her age mattered nothing to him now. Nothing mattered but that she was to be wholly his.

The morning after his return to Menlo he awoke with a confused sense that he should be late for his morning ride with Magdaléna. He laughed as his senses rattled into place, but he sighed just after; and both the laugh and the sigh were Magdaléna's, grim as the former may have been. That had been a time of peace and perfect content, and he could never forget it, not though he lived long years of unimaginable bliss with Helena--which he probably would not. A part of his life, limited and stunted a part as it was, belonged irrevocably to Magdaléna. He concluded, after some hard thinking, that it was his best part. He had given her something of his soul, and he had no wish to take it back. He had given her the reviving aspirations of an originally noble nature; the sun of her had shone upon the barren soil, and the harvest was hers. He was an unimaginative man, but he was inclined to believe that if there was a future existence, Magdaléna would belong to him then and for ever, that something even less definable than the soul of each belonged to the other. For there was nothing to be ashamed of in his love for Helena. She appealed as powerfully to his mind and heart as to his passion. But there was something beyond all, and he had no name for it,--unless it were that principle of absolute good as distinguished from its grades and variations; and it belonged to the girl whom he certainly no longer wanted in this life.

He wished that he had suggested to Helena to spend the summer in San Rafael or Monterey. Menlo Park belonged to Magdaléna; he found himself hating the thought of having a series of very perfect memories disturbed, even by the most passionately loved of women. And so Magdaléna had her first revenge.

He went reluctantly enough to Fair Oaks in the afternoon. The very leaves whispered as they drove through the woods. He had protested, but Helena must see 'Léna at once; she could never be entirely happy until she had looked into 'Léna's eyes and convinced herself that they were quite unchanged. And Trennahan must go, too, and have it over. Trennahan, who only crossed her whims for the pleasure of making up with her later, admitted that she was right, and went.

Mrs. Yorba was on the verandah receiving Mrs. Geary and Mrs. Brannan. Magdaléna was upstairs in her room. The monotony of those afternoon receptions had taken its place among the distasteful things of life, and she was determined not to go down until she was sent for. Each time she heard wheels she went to the window and looked out. The third time she saw Trennahan and Helena. The very bones of her skeleton seemed to fall upon each other; she sank to the ground with less vigour than a shattered soldier. But in a moment she gave a hard gasp and pressed her hands to her face. Then she heard Helena's voice,--that sweet husky voice which was not the least potent of her charms.

"'Léna! 'Léna! Well, I'll go look for her."

Magdaléna scrambled to her feet and fled down the hall to her mother's dressing-room. There, in a cupboard, was always a decanter of sherry; for Mrs. Yorba, after her neuralgic attacks, was often faint. Magdaléna filled a glass, drank it, and blessed the swift fire which shook her will free and made a disciplined regiment of her nerves. She was so delighted at her sudden mastery over herself that she ran out into the hall, caught Helena in her arms, and kissed her demonstratively. Helena burst into tears. "You are the best girl on earth," she sobbed. "And I feel so wicked; but I am so happy."

Magdaléna dried her tears, a part she had filled many times. "You are the dearest and most honest girl in the world," she said.

"Oh, I try to be honest, but I get so mixed up. I wish I could have a new set of commandments handed down all for myself, and that I could have made the rough draft of them. Then I'd be quite happy. But come down and see Jack,--I couldn't stand John. He's awfully brown and looks splendid."

Trennahan gave Magdaléna's hand a friendly shake and asked her what the plans for the summer were.

"Papa has a frightfully economical fit and says we are not to entertain any more. He doesn't even allow us enough water to wash the windows; and if this supply of gasoline gives out before the end of the summer, we've got to burn oil."

"Magdaléna!" gasped Mrs. Yorba. She wondered if her contribution to the Yorbas had suddenly gone mad. But the sherry was in Magdaléna's head. She was quite conscious of it, but recklessly decided to let it have its way so long as it helped her to convey to Trennahan the information that he was no more to her than the browning tuberoses on the lawn.

"It's only what everybody knows," she replied. "I am sure everybody in Menlo has discussed him threadbare. Mr. Trennahan, you happened upon him in the oasis of his life; you never could stand it to dine here now. We can scarcely see to eat, and he never opens his mouth except to swear at the servants."

Mrs. Yorba was speeding her guests. When she returned, she gave her daughter an annihilating glance and went into the house. Trennahan stared at Magdaléna. He saw her object, but could not guess the motive-power behind. A sudden, sickening fear assailed him: Was Magdaléna deteriorating? And he the cause? But Magdaléna was rattling on. The sherry seemed to have a marvellous power over one's wits and tongue. Why had she not known of it in the days when she had longed to shine? But her mother did not approve of girls drinking wine, and she had rarely tasted it, although until recently it had always been on the table.

"You both look so well," she said. "You don't look so tired as most engaged people do. I suppose you don't sit up every night until twelve talking about yourselves, as they generally do, I am told. That must be so fatiguing. Mr. Trennahan, you are actually stouter. You don't look as if you had been climbing perpendicular mountains. Is it true that a man stepped over the Bridal Veil backward? Do tell me all about it!"

Helena was staring at Magdaléna with her mouth half open. She was the least obtuse of mortals, but although she knew that pride was at the root of Magdaléna's extraordinary behaviour, she concluded that love had fled, and marvelled, for she had believed Magdaléna to be the deepest and most tenacious of women. But she was very glad.

"Well!" she exclaimed. "Something has improved you! You will be fairly brilliant by next winter. And do for goodness' sake, 'Léna, give Don Roberto to understand that he's not to have his own way. He's like all bullies: he'd soon give in if you bullied him. I adore papa, and would do anything on earth for him; but if he had been born a different sort, and gave me trouble, I'd find more than one way of bringing him to terms. Just flash your eyes at Don Roberto as you're flashing them at us, and you'll see the difference it will make."

Has she ceased to love me? thought Trennahan. Thank God!--at least I ought to.

When they had gone, the sherry had run its course, and Magdaléna felt very much ashamed of herself. I overdid it, she thought in terror, as she recalled her scintillating remarks and elaborate manner. He must have suspected! I'll drink no more, and next time I'll be just what I would have been if I had never laid eyes on him--if I die in the attempt. And how I talked! What things I said! Great Heaven, I made a complete fool of myself!

And the knowledge that for once in her life she had thrown her dignity and pride to the winds put her other pain to flight, and she had at least one night unracked by the record within her.

XIX

Two days later she met Trennahan on the Montgomerys' verandah. She was her old sedate self, to his unspeakable relief. That Magdaléna should change, be less than the admirable creature he had loved when he was something more than himself, would have seemed no less a calamity than had the stars turned black. She sat up very straight in her prim little way and talked of Helena's new project; which was to build bath-houses down by the lagoon at Ravenswood and bathe when the tide was in. He told her that he too had a project: to persuade the men of Menlo to build a Club House, and thus have some sort of informal social centre. She told him that she thought that would be nice, and added that she wished she had a project too, but she was hopelessly unoriginal. Trennahan assured her that she did herself injustice; and in these admirable platitudes they pushed along a half-hour like a wheel-barrow, while both thought of the great oak staring at them from the foot of the garden.

It will come easier with time, she thought that night, as she pulled her clothes off with heavy fingers. I can almost look him in the eyes without wanting to fling myself at him. His voice does not matter so much, for I always hear it anyway. They say that when you no longer hear a person's voice in your memory the love has gone too. They will be away for a year after they marry. Perhaps I shall forget then. My memory is not very good.

She opened the upper drawer of her bureau and lifted out her large handkerchief box. In its lower part, carefully hidden away, were Trennahan's letters, several of his faded boutonnières, and one of his gloves. She had made up her mind the day she heard of his engagement to Helena that these things must be burnt, but had dreaded their sight and touch. Now, however, they must go. She was always conscious of their presence; something of her weakness might pass with their destruction. As she lifted out the handkerchiefs she came upon the dagger. It was a beautiful toy, but she pushed it aside resentfully. Its magic was not for her. She gathered up her tokens with trembling fingers, resisted the impulse to sit down and weep over them, laid them in the grate, and flung a bunch of lighted matches into the pyre.

* * * * *

Helena immediately gave a party. The Belmont house, like most of the others of Menlo, had been designed for comfort rather than for entertaining; but the dining-room was large, and when stripped of the many massive pieces of furniture which Colonel Belmont had brought from his Southern home, would have accommodated more dancing folk than the neighbours and their guests. The famous Four were not present; nor were they seen in Menlo that summer. Immediately after the announcement of Helena's engagement some cruel wag had sent each a miniature tub with "For Tears" inscribed with black paint upon the bottom. It was generally supposed that the afflicted quartette were spending their leisure over these tubs, for they had retired into as complete an obscurity as their various callings would permit. Helena told Magdaléna that she lived in terror of their poisoned or perforated bodies being found in the dark byways of Golden Gate Park; but the youth of the modern civilisation, while amenable to suffering, thinks highly of himself as a factor in current history.

Trennahan was not allowed to spend the evening in the smoking-room with the older men; he must keep himself in sight even while his Helena was dancing with another. He wandered about with a grim smile on his mouth, talking occasionally to the older ladies who sat in a corner; wall-flowers there were none. He wished that Magdaléna would take pity on him, for he was unmercifully bored; but she danced with exasperating regularity. Occasionally Helena slipped her hand through his arm and took him out in the garden, purring upon his shoulder and begging him not to be bored; but she must look at him! If he insisted upon it, she would not dance. He refused to countenance such a sacrifice, and protested that he was just beginning to understand the pleasure of evening parties. Once he did slip away, and was lying, with his coat off, a cigar between his lips, crosswise on a bed upstairs with Colonel Belmont and Mr. Washington, when he received a peremptory message to go downstairs at once. He threw his cigar away, jerked himself into his coat, and left the room with jeering condolences in his wake. He felt cross for the moment; but when he reached the hall below he smiled humorously as he met the protesting eyes of his lady.

"I can't bear to have you out of my sight!" she exclaimed. "It's horribly selfish, but I feel as if everything were a blank when you are out of the room."

What could a man do in the face of so much beauty and so much affection, but to vow to hold up the wall for the rest of the evening?

As he was taking Magdaléna to her carriage a little after midnight, she said to him shyly,--

"I hope you are quite happy."

And he answered with unmistakable fervour, "I am indeed."

Mrs. Yorba was detained by Mrs. Cartright, who was delivering herself of many words.

"Do you believe that love is everything in life?" Magdaléna asked him.

"By no means. Not even to woman, in spite of the poets. It induces intense concentration for the time, consequently looms larger in the affairs of life than the million other scraps that go to make up the vast patchwork. But it is as well to remember that it is but an occasional patch in the quilt, even if it be of the most vivid hue. And there is a lot to be got out of the other patches!"

"If you lost Helena, could you feel like that?"

"In time; beyond a doubt. Memory simply cannot hold water beyond a certain strain; there comes a rift at last, and the flood pours through."

"Then if you lost Helena, should you feel as--as--you did when you came here first? You were--tired of everything--you remember. You told me--you don't mind my speaking of it?" She was aghast at her inconsistency, but the magnet in the man was as irresistible as ever.

"Mind? From you? I have never talked to a human being about myself as I have talked to you. I don't know what would happen to me in such an event. I am neither a fool nor a drunkard, remember. I think I should seek entirely new, barely comprehended, lands,--the South Sea Islands, for instance. I have wasted my life. I have neither the energies nor the ambitions to pull up now. I should simply seek new oranges and squeeze them dry. There are always the intellectual pleasures, you know. I should not be proud of myself, but I should get through the remaining years somehow."

"There was something else--I should not speak of it--"

They were standing in the shadow of the char-à-banc. Trennahan raised her hand to his lips. "I was in a state of moral chaos when I met you,--that is what you mean. I do not think I ever shall be again. Even Helena could never do for me what you did. You and I made a great mistake, but we generated one of those singular friendships which no circumstances nor time can annihilate. Some day we shall take up the threads where they broke off. I always look forward to that. A man may be contented with one woman's love, but not with one woman's friendship. I am glad that you are as dear to Helena as you are to me. In time, perhaps we may all three live more or less together."

He was a man of humour, but he said that. She was a woman of little humour, but she laughed.

XX

The breathless state of Helena's affections did not interfere with her desire to lead in all things those favoured of her acquaintance. Although, in deference to Trennahan's emphatic wish, she forswore eccentricities, she taxed her fertile brain to keep Menlo Park in a whirl of excitement.

"It can't be done," said Rose. "The climate has poppy dust in it instead of oxygen, but she may wake us up for a while."

She did. The bath-houses were built, and the big char-à-bancs rolled down the dusty road to Ravenswood every morning. The salt water and the sun brought out the red in the girls' hair, so the pastime promised to weather one season, at least. She gave dances and picnics on alternate weeks, and her hospitality in the matter of luncheons and dinners was unbounded. The Colonel built a bowling-alley and a proper tennis-court; in short, there was no doubt about "The Belmonts'" being the nucleus of Menlo Park. Several times Helena persuaded the owner of the stage line between Redwood City and La Honda to let her drive; and she took a select few of her friends on the top of the lumbering coach, relegating the uneasy passengers to the stuffy interior. The road is one of the most picturesque in California, but the grades are steep, the turnings abrupt, dangerous in many places. Nevertheless, Helena, balancing on her narrow perch high above the wheelers' heels, managed her rapid mustangs so admirably that Trennahan, balancing beside her, wondered if he should be able to manage her one half so well.

"What Helena Belmont needs," said Mrs. Montgomery, with some asperity, "is six babies; and I hope for Mr. Trennahan's sake she'll have them. Otherwise, I should like to know where the poor man is to get any rest; she's a human cyclone."

"I never thought she'd marry so soon," replied Mrs. Brannan. "It looked as if she were going to be a regular old-time belle; and it took them years to get through."

"She's not married yet," remarked Mrs. Montgomery.

But these enormous energies, as Rose had predicted, reached their meridian in something under two months, after which, much to Trennahan's relief, Helena succumbed to Menlo Park, and manifested an increasing desire for long hours alone with him under the trees on the lawn, although she by no means allowed her neighbours to rest for more than seventy-two hours at a time.

XXI

Don Roberto and Mr. Polk took no part in these festivities; Mrs. Yorba and Magdaléna took less and less; the picture made by Don Roberto in his shirt-sleeves, manipulating a hose as the char-à-banc drove off, finally forbade his wife to riot while her husband toiled. She was angry and resentful; but she was a woman of stern principles, and she had a certain measure of that sort of love for her husband which duty prompts in those who are without passion.

"I don't pretend to understand your father," she said to Magdaléna. "The bees he gets in his bonnet are quite beyond me, but if he feels that way, he does, and that's the end of it; and he makes me feel uncomfortable all the time I am anywhere. I sha'n't go out again until he gets over this. You can go with somebody else."

"I would a great deal rather stay home. I don't enjoy myself. People work so hard to be amused. I'd much rather just sit still and do nothing."

"You're lazy, like all the Spanish. Well, you'll have to do a good deal of sitting still, I expect; and in a sick room, I'm afraid. Poor Hiram looks thinner and greyer every day. Almost all our relations died of consumption."

"I wrote to aunt how badly he was looking, but she has not answered."

"She won't, the heartless thing. She never loved him. But if he takes to his bed with slow consumption, she'll have to come up and do her share of the nursing. She ought to like it. Fat women always make good nurses."

Magdaléna was more than glad to fall out of the gaieties. She was beginning to feel that most demoralising of all sensations,--the disintegration of will. Pride, a certain excitement, and novelty had kept her armour locked for a time; but each time she met Trennahan, the ordeal of facing him with platitudes, or, what was worse still, in occasional friendly talks, and of witnessing Helena's little airs of possession, suggested a future and signal failure. She came to have a morbid terror that she should betray herself, and when in company with him kept out of the very reach of his voice. She never went to the woods, lest she meet him, with or without Helena. In those rustling arbours of many memories, she knew that she should let fly the passion within her. She was appalled that neither time nor will nor principle had authority over her love. She had made up her mind that she would, if not tear it up by the roots, at least level it to the soil from which it had sprung, and she was quite ready to believe that love was not all; that with her youth, intellect, and wealth there was much in life for her. But the plant flourished and was heavy with bloom. Even while she avoided him, she longed for the moment when he must of necessity speak to her. She welcomed the excuse to secede from the ranks of pleasurers, but even then she started up at every sound of wheels that might herald his approach. She longed for the wedding to be over; but Helena would not marry before December, that being her birth month and eminently suitable, in her logical fancy, for her second launching. Colonel Belmont, having satisfied himself that everyone in the little drama had acted with honour, was well pleased with his son-in-law; but he was much distressed at the attitude of the old friend who had hoped to fill a similar relation to Trennahan. Don Roberto, taciturn with everybody, refused to speak to Colonel Belmont, to return his courtly salutation.

"I suppose it is natural," said Colonel Belmont to Helena. "Don is not only eccentric, but he would almost rather lose a hundred thousand dollars than his own way. But I hope he'll come round in time, for it makes me feel right lonesome in my old age. He and Hi were the only real intimates I have had in California, and now Hi is going, poor old fellow! and of course I can do little to cheer him up until Don thaws out."

"Do you feel quite well yourself?" asked Helena, anxiously. "You often look so terribly pale."

"I never was better, honey, I assure you. But remember that you must expect to lose your old father some day. But I've been pretty good to you, haven't I? You'll have nothing but pleasant things to remember?"

"You're the very best angel on earth. I don't even love Jack so much. I thought I did, but I don't."

"Don't you love him?" asked her father, anxiously. He was eager for her to marry; he knew that his blood was white.

"Of course! What a question!"

XXII

It was an intensely hot September night. Magdaléna, knowing that sleep was impossible, had not gone to bed. She wandered restlessly about her large room, striving to force a current of air. Not a vibration came through the open windows, nor a sound. The very trees seemed to lean forward with limp hanging arms. Across the stars was a dark veil, riven at long intervals with the copper of sheet lightning. Her room, too, was dark. A light would bring a pest of mosquitoes. The high remote falsetto of several, as it was, proclaimed an impatient waiting for their ally, sleep.

Last night, Tiny had given a party, and wrung from Magdaléna a promise that she would go to it. Rose had called for her. At the last moment Magdaléna's courage had shrunk to a final shuddering heap, and as she heard the wheels of the Geary waggonette, she had run upstairs, and flung herself between the bedclothes, sending down word that she had a raging toothache. It was her first lie in many years, but it was better than to dance with despair and agony written on her relaxed face behind the windows of the garden in which Trennahan had asked her to marry him.

To-night she was seriously considering the proposition of going to her aunt in Santa Barbara, with or without her father's consent. Her sense of duty had not tumbled into the ruins of her will, but she argued that in this most crucial period of her life, her duty was to herself. Helena had not even asked her to be bridesmaid; she took her acquiescence for granted. Magdaléna laughed aloud at the thought; but she could not leave Helena in the lurch at the last moment. When she got to Santa Barbara, she could plead her aunt's ill health as excuse for not returning in time for the ceremony. She was in a mood to tell twenty lies if necessary, but she would not stand at the altar with Trennahan and Helena. Her passionate desire for change of associations was rising rapidly to the dignity of a fixed idea. To-morrow there must be a change of some sort, or her brain would be babbling its secrets. Already her memory would not connect at times. She felt sure that the prolonged strain had produced a certain congestion in her brain. And she was beginning to wonder if she hated Helena. The fires in Magdaléna burned slowly, but they burned exceeding hot.

She paused and thrust her head forward. For some seconds past her sub-consciousness had grasped the sound of galloping hoofs. They were on the estate, by the deer park; a horse was galloping furiously toward the house.

She ran to the window and looked out. She could see nothing. Could it be a runaway horse? Was somebody ill? The flying feet turned abruptly and made for the rear of the house, then paused suddenly. There was a furious knocking.

Magdaléna's knees shook with a swift presentiment. Something had happened--was going to happen--to her. She stood holding her breath. Someone ran softly but swiftly up the stair, and down the hall, to her room. She knew then who it was, and ran forward and opened the door.

"Helena!" she exclaimed. "What is the matter? Something has--Mr. Trennahan--"

Helena flung herself upon Magdaléna and burst into a passion of weeping. Magdaléna stood rigid, ice in her veins. "Is he dead?" she managed to ask.

"No! He isn't. I wish he were--No, I don't mean that--I'll tell you in a minute--Let me get through first!"

Magdaléna dragged her shaking limbs across the room and felt for a chair. Helena began pacing rapidly up and down, pushing the chairs out of her way.

"Would you like a light?" asked Magdaléna.

"No, thanks; I don't want to be eaten alive with mosquitoes. Oh, how shall I begin? I suppose you think we've had a commonplace quarrel. I wish we had. I swear to you, 'Léna, that up to to-night I loved him--yes, I know that I did! I was rather sorry I'd promised to marry so soon, for I like being a girl, not really belonging to anyone but myself, and I love being a great belle, and I think that I should have begged for another year--but I loved him better than anyone, and I really intended to marry him--"

"Aren't you going to marry him?"

"Don't be so stern, 'Léna! You don't know all yet. Lately I've been alone with him a great deal, and you know how you talk about yourselves in those circumstances. I had told him everything I had ever done and thought--most; had turned myself inside out. Then I made him talk. Up to a certain point he was fluent enough; then he shut up like a clam. I never was very curious about men; but because he was all mine, or perhaps because I didn't have anything else to think about, I made up my mind he should come to confession. He fought me off, but you know I have a way of getting what I want--if I don't there's trouble; and to-night I pulled his past life out of him bit by bit. 'Léna! he's had _liaisons_ with married women; he's kept house with women; he's seen the worst life of every city! For a few years--he confessed it in so many words--he was one of the maddest men in Europe. The actual things he told me only in part; but you know I have the instincts of the devil. 'Léna, _he's a human slum_, and I hate him! I hate him! I hate him!"

"But that all belongs to his past. He loves you, and you can make him better--make him forget--"

"I don't want to make any man better. I love everything to be clean and new and bright,--not mildewed with a thousand vices that I would never even discuss. Oh, he's a brute to ask me to marry him. I hate myself that I've been engaged to him! I feel as if I'd tumbled off a pedestal!"

"Are you so much better and purer than I? I knew much of this; but it did not horrify me. I knew too, what you may not know, that he came here in a critical time in his--his--inner life, and I was glad to think that--California had helped him to become quite another man." Her voice was hoarse, almost inarticulate.

Helena flung herself at Magdaléna's feet. She was trembling with excitement; but her feverish appeal for sympathy met with no response.

"That is another thing that nearly drove me wild,--that I had taken him away from you for nothing. I know you don't care now; but you did--perhaps you do now--sometimes I've suspected, only I wouldn't face it--and to think that in my wretched selfishness I've separated you for ever! For your pride wouldn't let you take him back now, and he's as wild about me as ever: I never thought he could lose control over himself as he did when I told him what I thought of him and beat him on the shoulders with both my fists. He turned as white as a corpse and shook like a leaf. Then he braced up and told me I was a little wild cat, and that he should leave me and come back when I had come to my senses, that he had no intention of giving me up. But he need not come back. I'll never lay eyes on him again. While he was letting me get at those things, I felt as if my love for him burst into a thousand pieces, and that when they flew together again they made hate. He told me he was used to girls of the world, who understood things; and that the girls of California were so crude they either knew all there was to know by experience, or else they were prudes--"

Helena paused abruptly and caught her breath. She had felt Magdaléna extend her arm and stealthily open a drawer in the bureau beside her chair. There was nothing remarkable in the fact, for in that drawer Magdaléna kept her handkerchiefs. Nevertheless, Helena shook with the palsy of terror; the cold sweat burst from her body. In the intense darkness she could see nothing, only a vague patch where the face of Magdaléna was. The silence was so strained that surely a shriek must come tearing across it. The shriek came from her own throat. She leaped to her feet like a panther, reached the door in a bound, fled down the hall and the stair, her eyes glancing wildly over her shoulder, and so out to her horse. It is many years since that night, but there are silent moments when that ride through the woods flashes down her memory and chills her skin,--that mad flight from an unimaginable horror, through the black woods on a terrified horse, the shadow of her fear racing just behind with outstretched arms and clutching fingers.

Helena's sudden flight left Magdaléna staring through the dark at the Spanish dagger in her hand. Her arm was raised, her wrist curved; the dagger pointed toward the space which Helena had filled a moment ago.

"I intended to kill her," she said aloud. "I intended to kill her."

The mental admission of the design and its frustration were almost simultaneous. Her brain was still in a hideous tumult. Weakened by suffering, the shock of Helena's fickleness and injustice, the sudden perception that her sacrifice had been useless, if not absurd, had disturbed her mental balance for a few seconds, and left her at the mercy of passions hitherto in-existent to her consciousness. Her love for her old friend, long trembling in the balance, had flashed into hate. Upon hate had followed the murderous impulse for vengeance; not for her own sake, but for that of the man whose weakness had ruined her life and his own. In the very height of her sudden madness she was still capable of a curious misdirected feminine unselfishness.

When she came to herself, chagrin that she had failed to accomplish her purpose possessed her mind for the moment, although she had made no attempt to follow Helena, beyond springing to her feet. Then her conscience asserted itself, and reminded her that she should be appalled, overcome with horror, at the awful possibilities of her nature. The picture of Helena in the death struggle, bleeding and gasping, rose before her. Her knees gave way with horror and fright, and she fell upon her chair, dropping the dagger from her wet fingers, staring at the grim spectre of her friend. Then once more the sound of galloping hoofs came to her ears. Both Helena and herself were safe.

In a few moments her thoughts grouped themselves into a regret deeper and bitterer still. She was capable of the highest passion, and Circumstance had diverted it from its natural climax and impelled it toward murder. She sat there and thought until morning on the part to which she had been born; the ego dully attempting to understand, to realise that its imperious demands receive little consideration from the great Law of Circumstance, and are usually ignored.

XXIII

The next morning Magdaléna did as wise a thing as if inspired by reason instead of blind instinct: she got on her horse and rode for six hours. When she returned home she was exhausted of body and inert of brain. She found a note from Helena awaiting her.

DEAREST 'LÉNA,--What a tornado and an idiot you must think me! I cannot explain my extraordinary departure. I suppose I was in such a nervous state that I was obsessed in some mysterious manner and went off like a rocket. I can assure you I feel like a stick this morning. You will forgive me, won't you? for you know that although my affections do fluctuate for some people, they never do for you.

Well! this morning I had a scene with papa. He was very angry, talked about honour and all that sort of thing, said that I was an unprincipled flirt, and that I expected too much of a man. But when I said I could not understand how so perfect a man as himself could wish his daughter to marry a rake, he never said another word, but went off and wound up with Mr. Trennahan. I don't know what they said to each other; I don't care. It's all too dreadful to think about, and I never want to hear the subject mentioned again.

We're going to Monterey this afternoon to remain till the end of the season, and then we'll go to the Blue Lakes for a little before settling down for the winter. I'm tired of Menlo. Can't you come to Monterey for a week or two? Do think about it. I haven't a minute to go over to Fair Oaks to say good-bye, but perhaps you'll come to the train. HELENA.

Magdaléna got some luncheon from the pantry, then went to bed and slept until six o'clock. At dinner Mr. Polk said to her,--

"I saw Trennahan this afternoon in a hack with a lot of luggage on behind, and I stopped the driver and got in, and went to the ferry with him. His engagement with Helena Belmont is broken, it seems, and he is off for Samoa. Looked like the devil, but was as polite as ever, and asked me to say good-bye to all of you."

Don Roberto looked up. "When he coming back?" he asked.

"You know as much about that as I do; or as he does, I guess. He told me that he was going to explore the South Seas thoroughly, and that ought to take as many years as he's got left, and more too."

It was two or three days before Magdaléna realised what a relief it was to have Trennahan out of the country. It moved him back among the memories, and struck from her imagination agitating possibilities. And he belonged to no woman! He could never be hers, but at least she could love him. Already she had begun to do so with a measure of calm. She could hide him in her soul and count him wholly hers; and the prospect seemed far sweeter and more satisfactory than she should have imagined of such immaterial union. And some day, she believed, he would write to her. He had spoken authoritatively of the permanence of their friendship, and of its necessity to him. He had not loved her, as men count love, but for a little she had been to him something more than other women had been. The spiritual sympathy which had been rudely interrupted, but had surely existed, taught her this. In time he would become conscious again of the bond, and his letters alone would be something to live for.

And she had much else. In the evenings when her father was weeding on the lawn, she devoted herself to her uncle; and he seemed grateful for her attentions, slight as was his response. He was visibly shrinking to his skeleton, although he neither coughed nor complained, and went to town every morning with the regularity of his youth. But his gaunt face was less savagely determined, his eyes had lost the hard surface of metal; and one evening when Magdaléna slipped her hand into his, he clasped and held it until Don Roberto, gloomy and perspiring, came panting across the drive.

And almost immediately Magdaléna began to write. She did not go to her nook in the woods, but after her morning ride she wrote in her room until luncheon. She told her mother of her literary plans and asked her advice about making a similar announcement to her father. Between astonishment and consternation Mrs. Yorba gasped audibly, and her impassive countenance looked as if the hinges had fallen out of its muscles.

"For God's sake don't tell your father!" she exclaimed; and she was not given to strong language. "I don't believe you can write, anyhow, and we should only have a terrible scene for nothing."

Magdaléna accepted the advice. Her father showed so little sense of his duty as a parent that her own was growing adaptable to circumstances, although she was still determined not to publish without his knowledge. She had not returned to her English romance: that had been consigned to the flames, and was now meditating in that limbo which receives the wraiths of the lame, the halt, and the blind of abortive talent. She was at work upon the simplest of the Old-Californian tales.

On the Saturday afternoon after Helena's departure for Monterey Rose called and invited Magdaléna to drive with her to the train to meet Mr. Geary. Tiny and Ila, who were with her, added their insistence, and Magdaléna, having no reasonable excuse, joined them. As they drove through the woods Ila confided her engagement to young Washington, and was kissed and congratulated in due form.

"I'm going to live in Paris," she announced. "No more California for me. You might as well be on Mars, in the first place, and everybody cackles over your private affairs, in the second. For the matter of that, you haven't any."

"I think it's disloyal of you to desert California," said Tiny. "I have a feeling that we should all keep together, and to the country."

"That's a very fine sentiment, but though I love you none the less, I want to live. I intend to be the best-dressed American in Paris. That's a reputation worth having."

"I'm going East to find a husband," said Rose, shamelessly. "There's no one to marry here. Alan Rush would not have been half bad, but he might as well be in an urn on Helena's mantel-piece. I like Eastern men best, anyhow."

"Why not go to Southern California?" asked Tiny. "It's not so far as New York; and there are always plenty of them there."

"I should feel like a ghoul,--man-hunting in One-lungdom, as Mr. Bierce calls it. Besides, I'd rather die an old maid than have a sick man on my hands for five minutes. I'm not heartless, but--well, we've all had our experiences with fathers and brothers. A sick man's an anomaly, somehow: he doesn't fit into a woman's imagination."

"I'm not going to marry at all," said Tiny. "Fancy what a lot of bother. It's so comfortable just to drift along like this."

"Tiny," said Rose, "you're a Menlo Park poppy."

They had arrived at the station, the pretty station under its great oak, and flanked by its beds of bloom. Eight or ten other equipages were there, waiting for the "Daisy train,"--the fast train from town which on Saturday afternoons carried many San Franciscans to Monterey.

The women were in their bright summer attire and full of chatter; as the train was not due for some moments, several got out of their carriages and went to other carriages to gossip. It was a very lively and agreeable scene: there being no outsiders, they were like one large family. In the middle of the large open space beside the platform stood several of the phaetons and waggonettes, whose horses stepped high at sight of the engine. On the far side was a row of Chinese wash-houses, in whose doors stood the Mongolians, no less picturesque than the civilisation across the way. Behind them was the tiny village of Menlo Park. On the opposite side of the track was a row of high closely knit trees which shut the Folsom place from the passing eye. Caro, under a big pink sunshade, had walked over to chat with her friends and escort her visitors home.

The train rolled in and discharged its favoured few. The wait was short, and Mr. Geary was still mounting the steps of his char-à-banc when Magdaléna sat forward with a faint exclamation. The smoking-car was slowly passing. Four hats at four consecutive windows were raised as they drifted past. They were the hats of Alan Rush, Eugene Fort, Carter Howard, and "Dolly" Webster.

XXIV

The Yorba house on Nob Hill was the gloomiest house in San Francisco in any circumstances; upon the return of the family to town this year it suggested a convent of perpetual silence. Mrs. Yorba, bereft of her full corps of servants, herself shook the curtains free of their loops and pinned them together. "Ah Kee can play the hose on the windows from the outside once a month," she remarked to her daughter; "but Heaven only knows when they will be washed inside again, or how often poor Ah Kee will have time to sweep the rooms. I shall make an attempt to keep the reception-room in some sort of order; and as it is comparatively small and I can dust it myself, I may succeed, but I don't suppose anyone will ever enter the parlours again. There seems no hope of your father coming to his senses."

Magdaléna flung her own curtains wide, determined to have light if she had to wash the windows herself. But the rest of the house chilled and oppressed her. Even her mother's bedroom was half-lighted, and the halls and rooms downstairs were echoing vaults. One was almost afraid to break the silence; even the soft-footed Chinaman walked on his toes. Magdaléna conceived the whimsical idea that her father's house had been closed to receive all the family skeletons of San Francisco, of which many whispers had come to her. Sometimes she fancied that she heard their bones rattling at night, as they crowded together, muttering their terrible secrets. But the idea only amused her; it did not make her morbid, although there was little but her own will to keep her spirits on a plane where there was more light than bog. It was a very grey and rainy winter. She was forced to spend the afternoons after four o'clock in idleness: Don Roberto himself turned off the gas every morning before he went down town, and on again at seven in the evening. The meals in the dining-room, naturally the darkest room in the house, were eaten in absolute silence. In fact, it was seldom that anyone spoke except on Mrs. Yorba's reception day. Herself wore the air of a stoic. Don Roberto's keen eyes searched his wife and daughter now and again for any sign of extravagance in attire, but he rarely addressed them except on the first of the month, when he demanded their accounts. He peremptorily forbade them to go out after dusk, as the night air was bad for the horses. The evenings he spent in his study with his brother-in-law. Mrs. Yorba and Magdaléna sat in their respective rooms until nearly half-past ten; when Don Roberto went the rounds to see that the lights were out. Were it not for his fear of earthquakes, he would have turned off the gas at that hour, but he permitted a tiny spark to burn in the halls all night. Occasionally Mr. Polk came home early and went to Magdaléna's little sitting-room, the old schoolroom, and sat with her for an hour or two. He said little and never talked of himself. She longed to bring her aunt back to this lonely old man, but did not know in the least how to go about it, and the subject never was mentioned between them; he might have been a bachelor or a widower. But as he sat staring into the fire, Magdaléna was convinced that he was thinking of his wife. She had never entered his house since the day of her strange discovery; delicacy kept her away, but her feminine curiosity often tempted her to go in and see if the fires were burning, the flowers and magazines on the table. Sometimes at night she heard footsteps in the connecting gardens behind the houses, and fancied they were those of her uncle, gone on what pilgrimage she dared not imagine.

She and Helena met again early in November. They greeted each other with all their old cordiality, but there was a barrier, and both felt it. Still, they exchanged frequent visits, and Magdaléna was always interested in Helena's new conquests and dazzling regalities. Helena was enjoying herself mightily. She had all her old admirers exhausting and coining adjectives at her feet, and a number of distinguished foreigners, who were spending the winter in San Francisco. She could not drive, nor yacht, nor run to fires on account of the weather, but she unloosed her energies upon indoor society, and started a cotillion club, and an amateur opera company. She gave a fancy dress ball, to which all her guests were obliged to come in the costumes of Old California, and laughed for a week at the ridiculous figure which most of them cut. She also gave many dinners and breakfasts, kettle-drums and theatre parties, and, altogether, managed to amuse herself and others. She never mentioned Trennahan to Magdaléna. Nor did he write. The Pacific might have been climbing over him, for any sign he gave.

XXV

It was midnight, and Magdaléna was still awake; a storm raged, prohibitive of sleep. The wind screamed over the hills, tearing the long ribbons of rain to bits and flinging them in great handfuls against the windows; from which they rebounded to the porch to skurry down the pipes and gurgle into the pools of the soaked ground below. The roar of the ocean bore aloft another sound, a long heavy groan,--the fog-horn of the Farallones. Magdaléna imagined the wild scene beyond the Golden Gate: the ships driven out of their course, bewildered by the fog, the loud unceasing rattle of the rigging, the hungry boom of the breakers, the mountains and caverns of the raging Pacific. Her mind, open to impressions once more, stirred as it had not during its period of subservience to the heart, and toward expression. Suffering had not worked those wonders with her literary faculty of which she had read; but she certainly wrote with something more of fluency, something less of attenuated commonplace. She had finished her first story; and although it by no means satisfied her, she had passed on to the next, determined to write them all; then, with the education accruing from long practice, to go back to the beginnings and make them literature. To-night she forgot her stories and lay wondering at the ghostly images rolling through her brain, breaking upon the wall which stood between themselves and speech,--hurled back to rise and form again. What did it mean? Was some dumb dead poet trying to speak through her brain, inextricably caught in the folds of her ravening intelligence before recognising its fatal limitations? Or was that intelligence but the half of another, divided out there in eternity before being sucked earthwards? It was seldom that such fancies came to her nowadays, but to-night the storm shrieked with a thousand voices, no one of which was unfamiliar to these ghosts in her mind. She had heard the expression "hell let loose" variously applied. Were those the souls of old and wicked mates tossed into the wild playground of the storm, helpless and furious shuttle-cocks, yelling their protests with furious energy? The idea that she too might have been wicked once thrilled Magdaléna unexpectedly: she had had a few sudden brief lapses into primal impulse, accompanied by a certain exaltation of mind. As she recalled them the rest of her life seemed flat by comparison, and unburdened with meaning; something buried, unsuspected, left over from another existence, shook itself and made as if to leap to those doomed wretches, heavy with memories, buffeting each other on the tides of the storm.

A crash brought her upright. It had been preceded by a curious bumping along the front of the house. She realised in a moment what it meant: the flag-pole had snapped and been hurled to the ground. She thought of her father's dismay, and shuddered slightly; she was in a mood to greet omens hospitably.

Suddenly her eyes fixed themselves expandingly upon the door. She was cast in a heroic mould; but the storm and the vagaries of her imagination had unnerved her, and she shook violently as the knob was softly turned and the door moved forward with significant care. Had her father gone suddenly mad? The possibility had crossed her mind more than once. She would lock her door hereafter.

"What is it?" she faltered.

The door was pushed open abruptly. Her uncle stood there. For a moment she thought it was his ghost. The dim light of the hall shone on a ghastly face, and he wore a long gown of grey flannel. He held one hand pressed against his chest. In another second she heard the rattling of his breath. She sprang out of bed and ran to him.

"I am going to die," Mr. Polk said. "Telegraph and ask her to come."

She led him to his room, roused her father and mother, telephoned for the doctor and a messenger boy, then went to her room, dressed, and wrote the telegram. She had little time to think, but the approach of death made her hands shake a little, and lent an added significance to the horrid sounds without. Death had been a mere name before these last few moments; he suddenly became an actual presence stalking the storm.

The bell rang. She went down to the door herself. It was the messenger boy. She gave him the telegram to despatch, and told him to return and to remain on duty all night. Then she went to her uncle's room. Her mother and a dishevelled maid were compounding mustard plasters and heating water. Her father was huddled in an armchair, staring at the gasping form on the bed. Magdaléna shuddered. His face was more terrible to look on than the sick man's.

"It's pneumonia, of course," said Mrs. Yorba, in the hushed whisper of the sick room, although her hard voice was little more sympathetic in its lower register. "He was wet through when he came home this afternoon. I should think it had rained enough for one year."

The doctor came and eased the sufferer with morphine; but he gave the watchers no hope.

"He has no lungs, anyhow," he said. "This abrupt climax is rather a mercy than otherwise."

Magdaléna remained by the bedside during all of the next day. Early in the morning a telegram came from Mrs. Polk, saying that she was about to start on a special train. The message was read to her husband, and he whispered to Magdaléna, "I should live until she came,--if she took a week." That was the only remark he made until late in the day, when he motioned to Magdaléna to bend her ear to his lips. "Don't waste your youth," he whispered; and then he coloured slightly, as if ashamed of having broken the reticence of a lifetime.

Don Roberto barely moved from the chair which commanded a view of the dying man's face. His own shrank visibly. He neither ate nor drank. His sunken terror-struck eyes seemed staring through the passing face on the high pillows into an inferno beyond.

"I declare, he gives me the horrors, and I'm not a nervous woman," said Mrs. Yorba to her daughter. "I never could understand your father's queer ways. Who would ever have thought that he could care for anyone like that? Poor Hiram! No one can feel worse than I do; but he has to go, and as the doctor says, this is a mercy; there's no use acting as if you had lost your last friend on earth."

"Perhaps that's the way papa feels; and as you say, he's not like other people."

The only other person in the sick-room was Colonel Belmont. He came over as soon as he heard of the attack, and sat on the other side of the bed all day, when he was not attempting to make himself useful. His old comrade smiled when he entered; but Mr. Polk took little notice of anyone. Occasionally his eyes rested with an expression of profound pity on the face of his brother-in-law: once or twice he pressed Magdaléna's hand; but his attention chiefly centred on the door, although he knew that his wife could not arrive until after midnight.

Magdaléna went to the train to meet her aunt. It was still raining, but calmly. There was no gay and chattering crowd in Market Street, not even the light of a cable car flashing through the grey drizzle. Magdaléna recalled the night of the fire. Her inner life had undergone many upheavals since that night; even her feeling for Helena was changed. And her aunt was a mere memory.

At the station she left the carriage and walked along the platform as the train drew in. Mrs. Polk, assisted by a Mexican maid, descended from the car. She was very stout, but as she approached Magdaléna, it was evident that her carriage had lost nothing of majesty or grace. She kissed her niece warmly.

"So good you are to come for me, _mijita_. And when rain, too--so horriblee San Francisco. Never I want to see again. And the uncle? how he is?"

"He says he will live until you come; but he won't live long after."

"Poor man! I am sorry he go so soon. But all the mens die early in California now: work so hard. Live very old before the Americanos coming."

They could talk without restraint in the carriage, for the maid did not speak English; but Mrs. Polk merely asked how her husband had caught cold. Her fair placid face and sleepy eyes showed no print of the years. She seemed glad to see Magdaléna again.

"Often I wish have you with me in Santa Barbara," she said. "But Roberto is what the Americanos call 'crank.' No is use asking him. Santa Barbara no is like in the old time, but is nice sleep place, where no have the neuralgia, and nothing to bother. Then always I have the few old families that are left, and we are so friends,--see each other every day, and eat the Spanish dishes. I no know any Americanos; always I hating them. So thin you are, _mijita_; I wish I can take you back."

But Magdaléna felt no desire to go with her; her aunt seemed to belong to another life.

When they reached home, Mrs. Polk went to Mrs. Yorba's room to remove her wraps and drink a cup of chocolate. She smoothed her beautiful dusky hair and arranged the old-fashioned lace about her throat, then sailed in all her languid majesty across the hall.

"Aunt," said Magdaléna, with her hand on the door of the sick room, "will--will--you kiss uncle?"

Mrs. Polk raised her eyebrows. "Why, yes, is he wanting; but I never kiss him in my life. Why now?"

"He is dying, and he has wanted you more than anything."

"So queer fancies the seeck people have. But I kiss him, of course."

As she entered the room, Mr. Polk raised himself slightly and stared at her with an expression she had never seen in his young eyes. It thrilled her nerves within their mausoleum of flesh. She bent over and kissed him. "Poor Eeram!" she said. "So sorry I am. But you no suffer, no?"

He made no reply. He sank back to his pillows; and after greeting her brother, she took a chair beside the bed and sat there until her husband died, in the ebb of the night. He held her hand, his eyes never leaving her beautiful face, never losing their hunger until the film covered them. What thoughts, what bitter regrets, what futile desires for another beginning may have moved sluggishly in that disintegrating brain, he carried with him into the magnificent vault which his widow erected on Lone Mountain.

His will was read on the day following the funeral, in the parlour where his coffin had rested, and by the light of a solitary gas-jet. Magdaléna had never heard a will read before: she hoped she might never hear another. The three women in their black gowns, the four executors and trustees in their crow-black funeral clothes,--her father, Colonel Belmont, Mr. Washington, and Mr. Geary,--the big rustling document with its wearisome formalities,--made a more lugubrious picture than the lonely coffin of the day before. The terms of the will were simple enough: the interest of the vast fortune was left to Mrs. Polk; upon her death it was to be divided between his sister and niece, the principal to go to Magdaléna upon Mrs. Yorba's death. When Mr. Washington finished reading the document, Don Roberto spoke for the first time in four days.

"I go to resign. I no will be executor or trustee. No need me, anyhow." And he would listen to no argument.

The next day he called a meeting of the bank's board of directors and resigned the presidency, requesting that Mr. Geary, a cautious and solid man, should succeed him. His wish was gratified, and he walked out of the bank, never to enter it again. His many other interests were in the hands of trustworthy agents: neither he nor his brother-in-law had ever made a mistake in their choice of servants. When he reached home, he wrote to each of these agents demanding monthly instead of quarterly accounts. He had a bed brought down to a small room adjoining the "office," and in these two rooms he announced his intention to live henceforth. At the same time he informed his wife and daughter that their allowance hereafter would be one hundred dollars a year each, and that he would pay no bills. Ah Kee, who had lived with him for twenty years, would attend to the domestic supplies. Then he ordered his meals brought to the office, and shut himself up.

On the third day Mrs. Polk said to Magdaléna,--

"Si I stay in this house one day more, I go mad, no less. Is like the dungeons in the Mission. _Madre de Dios!_ and you living like this for years, perhaps; for Roberto grow more crank all the time. Come with me. I no think he know."

"You may be sure that he knows everything. And I cannot leave them. Shall you go back to Santa Barbara? Don't you want to travel?"

"_Dios de mi alma_; no! I think I go to die on that treep from Santa Barbara--so jolt. I am too old to travel. Once I think I like see Spain; but now I only want be comfortable. Well, si you change the mind and come sometime, I am delight. But I go now: feel like I am old flower wither up, without the sun."

XXVI

Mrs. Polk's large white face and throat had seemed to shed a measure of light in the dark house; when she left, the gloom seemed to get down and sit on one. Helena refused to enter by the front door, and lamenting that she was too big to climb the pillar, paid her visits by way of the kitchen and back stairs.

After the calls of condolence visitors came more and more rarely to the Yorba house. They said it depressed them for days after, and that while there they sat in mortal terror of hearing Don Roberto burst out of his den with the yell of a maniac. And as for dear Mrs. Yorba and Magdaléna, they never had had much to say, but now they had nothing. They would not drop off altogether, for the old don was bound to follow his brother-in-law in course of time, and then his widow would once more be a useful member of society. Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Geary, and Mrs. Cartright were more faithful than the others, but the affections Mrs. Yorba had inspired during her long and distinguished sojourn in San Francisco were not very deep and warm.

The girls were sorry for Magdaléna, and called frequently, conquering their horror of the gloomy echoing house; but they had less to endure than their elders, for they were received in Magdaléna's own sitting-room, which, although sparsely and tastelessly furnished, was always as cheerful as the weather would permit. They brought her all the gossip of the outside world, discussed the new novels with her, and occasionally induced her to spend a day with them.

At the end of the winter Ila was married; very grandly, in Grace Church. All her friends but Magdaléna were bridesmaids. The omission was a serious one, and all felt that it robbed the function of a last fine finish: each of the girls had counted upon having the last of the Yorbas for chief bridesmaid. Magdaléna went and sat in a corner of the church and saw the first of her friends break the circle of their girlhood. Her present had been very meagre: it had come out of her monthly allowance. Mrs. Polk was much too indolent to consider whether her niece was allowed an income suitable for her position or not, and Magdaléna was much too proud to ask favours. She slipped out of the church just before the end of the ceremony, feeling like a poor relation.

She rarely saw her father. Occasionally she met him in the hall; he drifted past her like a ghost. Mr. Polk died in February. On the first of June Don Roberto had not been out of the house for three months, nor had he exchanged a word with his wife or daughter.

"He'll blink like an owl when he does go out," said Mrs. Yorba. "I wonder if he remembers that it is time to go to the country?"

"He never forgets anything. I'll pack his things if you like."

But the day passed and the next, and Don Roberto gave no sign of remembering that it was time to move. Then Mrs. Yorba drew several long breaths, went downstairs, and knocked at his door. There was no response, but she turned the knob and went in. Don Roberto's face was between the large pages of a ledger. He looked round with a scowl.

"Everything is ready to move down. Are you not coming?"

"No; and you no going either. Letting the place."

If the President of the United States had let the White House, Mrs. Yorba could not have been more astounded.

"Let Fair Oaks! Fair Oaks?"

"Yes."

"And where are we to go this summer?"

"We stay here."

"Robert! You cannot mean that. No one stays here in summer. The city is impossible--those trade-winds--those fogs--"

"Need not go out. Can stay in the house." And Don Roberto returned to his ledger.

Mrs. Yorba went straight to Magdaléna's room, and for the first time in her daughter's experience of her, wept.

"To think of spending a summer in San Francisco! How I have looked forward to the summer! Things are always bright and cheerful in Menlo even with the house shut up, for one can sit on the verandah. But here! And not a soul in town! And the house like a prison! What in Heaven's name ails your father? He's not crazy. He's reading his ledgers, and what he says is to the point, goodness knows! But I shall follow Hiram if this keeps up. You're a real comfort to me, 'Léna. I don't know what I should do without you."

Magdaléna said what she could to console her mother. The two had drawn together during these trying months. She was bitterly disappointed that she could not go to Menlo Park. She was tired of its efforts to amuse itself, but she could live in its woods, its soft gracious air, find companionship in the distant redwoods swimming in their dark-blue mists.

The girls all invited her to visit them, but she would not leave her mother, even could her father's consent be obtained. Mrs. Yorba was genuinely unhappy. Without mental resources, and deprived of even an occasional hour with her friends, she was further harassed by the fear that her husband would die and leave her with a pittance: he certainly appeared to hate the sight of his family. It consoled her somewhat to reflect that wills were easily broken in California. Why had her brother left her nothing? With a full purse she could at least have the distractions of philanthropy. She took to novel-reading with a voracious appetite, and her taste grew so exacting that she would have nothing that was not magnificently sensational. She thought on Boston with a shudder, but concluded that it was enough to have been intellectual when young.

Magdaléna plodded on with her work. She described the customs and manners of the old times with much accuracy, and felt that her beloved creations were rather more than puppets; and it was as much for their sake as for her own that she wanted these little histories to be triumphs of art, that they might arrest the attention of the world. Alvarado and Castro were great heroes to her: it was unjust and cruel that the big world outside of California should know nothing of them; to the present Californian, for that matter, they were not even names. And forty years before the Californias had bent to their nod! They had lived with the state of princes, and the wisdom with which the one had ruled and the other had managed his armies would have given them lasting fame had not their country then been as remote from Earth's greater civilisations as had it been on Jupiter. If she could only immortalise them! That would be a sufficient reason for living, compensate her for the wreck of her personal life. It might take a lifetime, but what of that if she succeeded in the end?

She took long walks daily; alone, for the French maid had been dismissed long since. The walks were not pleasant, for when the sand from the outlying dunes was not swept through the city by the bitter trades, the fog was crawling into one's very marrow. And the hills were steep. Sometimes she took the cable car to the end of the line, then walked to the Presidio; but that brought the sand-hills nearer, and she went home with smarting eyes. Protected by her window, she found beauty even in the summer mood of San Francisco; and sometimes she went up into the tower of the Belmont house and watched the long clouds of dust roll symmetrically down the streets of the city's valleys; or the delicate white mist ride through the Golden Gate to wreathe itself about the cross on Calvary, then creep down the bare brown cone to press close about the tombs on Lone Mountain; then onward until all the city was gone under a white swinging ocean; except the points of the hills disfigured with the excrescences of the rich. Into the cañons and rifts of the hills beyond the blue bay the fog crept daintily at first, hanging in festoons so light that the very trades held aloof, then advancing with a rush,--a phantom of the booming ocean whence it came.

And Trennahan? He made no sign. Whether he were dead or alive, the victim or the captor of his old familiars, careless, or nursing an open wound, Magdaléna was miserably ignorant. The time had come when she waited tensely as mails were due, feeling that an empty envelope covered with his handwriting would give her solace. She cherished no hope that he would ever return to her, but he had promised her his lasting friendship. Sometimes she wondered at the cruelty of men. Why should he not help her? Even if he really believed in the extinction of her love, he might guess that she needed his friendship. She had yet to learn that the one thing that man never gives to woman is spiritual help.

Helena wrote that her father was so anxious for her to marry Alan Rush that she was officially engaged to that much-enduring youth and really liked him. Menlo Park was the same as ever; not so gay as last year, but the same in quality. No one had called on the lessees of Fair Oaks. They were new people whom nobody knew, and it would be horrid to go there, anyhow. Caro was engaged to marry an Englishman who had bought a grape-ranch some twenty miles from Menlo. Tiny was prettier and more bored than usual. Rose wrote that she certainly could not stand another summer of Menlo and should go East in the autumn. Ila wrote from Paris, London, and Homburg that life was quite perfect. It was so interesting to be named Washington,--everybody stared so; as the English had never read a line of United States history, they thought her George was a lineal descendant of the immortal head of his house; and she had thirty-two trunks of Paris clothes and ever so many men in love with her.

And Magdaléna lived this life for three years. Its monotony was broken by one event only.

XXVII

During the winter following Mr. Polk's death, Colonel Belmont was driving his coach along the beach beyond the Park one afternoon when Helena, who sat beside him, saw him give a long shudder, then huddle. She grasped the reins of the four swiftly trotting horses and spoke over her shoulder to Alan Rush.

"Pull my father up to the top," she said.

Rush did as he was bid, and the body of Colonel Belmont was laid out between the two rows of young people, whose gaiety had frozen to horror.

"Now take the reins," said Helena.

Rush took the reins. Helena followed her father swiftly and stooped to take his head in her arms. But she dropped her ear to his lips instead, then to his heart. For a moment longer she stared at him, while the others waited for the outburst. But she returned to the front seat, and caught the reins from Rush's hands.

"I must do something," she said; and he knew better than to answer her, or even to look at her.

It was some time before she could turn the horses, and then she was several miles from home. She drove with steady hands; but when they had reached the house and Rush lifted her down, she was trembling violently. She pushed him aside.

"Go and get Magdaléna," she said.

Magdaléna remained with her a week. This was Helena's first real grief, and there was nothing cyclonic about it. "I'll never get over it," she said. "Never! And I'll never be quite the same again. Of course I don't mean that I'll have this awful sense of bereavement and keep on crying all my life: I know better than that; but I could never forget him, nor forget to wish I still had him, if I lived to be a hundred. If I had anything to reproach myself for--anything serious--I believe I'd go off my head; but I _was_ good to him; and I am sure mamma never could have taken better care of him than I did. When he was under doctor's orders I gave him every drop of the medicine myself, and I never would let him eat a thing I thought wouldn't agree with him. He used to say his life was a burden, poor darling, but I know he liked it. And who knows?--if I hadn't watched him so, he might not have lived as long as he did. That is my one consolation.... This terrible grief makes everything else seem so paltry; I could not even think of being engaged to Alan Rush any longer. Poor fellow! I feel sorry for him, but I can't play for a long time to come. As for papa's wishes in the matter, Mr. Geary and Mr. Washington will take care of my money, and I am quite able to take care of myself. If papa is near me now, he will understand how I feel, and agree with me. I wish I had some heroic destiny. Why has the United States ceased to make history? I'd like to play some great part. Papa used to say there was bound to be another upheaval some day, but I'm afraid it won't be in my time."

"It may," replied Magdaléna. "There's a good deal of history-making, quiet and noisy, going on all the time. I've been reading the newspapers this last year. They're horrid sensational things, but I manage to get a few ideas from them. No one can tell what may happen ten years hence. You may have a chance to be the heroine of a revolution yet."

"I'm afraid I'll never be anything but a belle, and I'm tired of that already, although I never could stand being shelved. But if there is a revolution during my life I'll be a factor in it. Just you remember that."

"I really do believe that you were intended for something extraordinary."

"I believe I was. That's the reason I'm so restless and dramatic. I don't feel as if I ever could be so again, though,--not for ages, anyhow."

The old close and affectionate intimacy between the two girls was restored during that week. At its end Helena went East to visit her aunt, Mrs. Forbes. She was the untrammelled mistress of something under a million dollars; and as her private car, filled with flowers, bonbons, and books, pulled away from a sorrowing crowd of friends on the Oakland side of the ferry, it must be confessed she reflected that the future would appear several shades darker if she were arranging her belongings in a half-section, a small quarterly allowance in her pocket. Nevertheless Colonel Belmont had his reward. His daughter's grief was deep and lasting; and perhaps he knew.

XXVIII

Caro married her Englishman, and on a thriving grape-farm entertained other Englishmen. Rose went East and triumphantly captured a Baltimorean of distinguished lineage and depleted exchequer. Tiny went to Europe again. Magdaléna was practically alone. Her father still lived in his two rooms downstairs and never spoke to anyone but Ah Kee. Once he forgot to close his study door, and Magdaléna, who happened to be passing, paused and looked at him. His face had shrunken and was crossed with a thousand fine and eccentric lines; like the palm of a man singled out for a career of trouble. He had let his hair and beard grow, and he looked uncouth and dirty.

Mrs. Yorba still read novels. She no longer paid calls, for her allowance, now reduced to fifty dollars a year, was quite inadequate to meet the requirements of a dignified member of society. She received her few intimate and faithful friends in her bedroom; the first floor was never dusted nor aired. The house smelt musty and deserted; the lower rooms were as cold and damp as underground caverns; the spiders spun unheeded; when the front door was opened, the festoons in the hall swung like hammocks. Even the gloom of the house seemed to accentuate with the years. Magdaléna wondered if the inside of the old Polk house looked any more haunted than this; and even the Belmont house was acquiring an expression of pathos, peculiar to desertion in old age. Magdaléna fancied that the three houses must be pointed out to visitors as the sarcophagi of the futile ambitions of three Californian millionaires.

In her own rooms she toiled on, absorbed in her work, loving it with the beggared passion of her nature, experiencing two or three moments of creative ecstasy and many hours of dull discouragement. She wrote her stories and rewrote them; then again, and again. Her critical faculty took long strides ahead of her creative power, and she rarely ceased to be uneasy at the disparity between her work and her ideals. But Trennahan had said that it would be ten years before she could attain excellence, and she was willing to serve a harder apprenticeship than this. Had it not been for her work and the books of those who had climbed the heights and slept beneath the stars, she might have become morbid and melancholy in her unnatural surroundings. But although the monotony of her life was never broken by a day in the country, she had always the beauty of bay and hill and sky beyond her window; and there are certain months in the spring and autumn when San Francisco is as lovely and brilliant as the southern shores of California. The trades are hibernating in the caves of the Pacific, and the fogs exist only in the spray of the ponderous waves. On such days and evenings Magdaléna sat for hours on her little balcony, forgetting her work, dreaming idly. It was inevitable, in her purely mental and imaginative life, that she should apprehend in Trennahan the lover again. She wove her own romance as ardently and consecutively as that of any of her heroines. In time he would forget Helena; his love for her had been one of those sudden insane passions of which she had read,--which she tried to depict in her Southland tales,--and in time it would fall from him, and he would hear the tinkle of the chain forged in long hours of perfect sympathy. They would both be older and wiser and more sad: the better, perhaps. Loneliness and the peculiar circumstances of her life inclined her to borderland sympathies; she believed that if he died suddenly she should become immediately aware of the fact.

Her love for Trennahan by no means interfered with her literary ambitions. All others had failed her; she knew now that with the best of opportunities she should never have cut a brilliant figure in society. But she did not care; letters were a far more glorious goal. Helena adored great military heroes, great imperialists like Clive and Hastings, even great tyrants like Napoleon. Herself reverenced the great names in literature, and could think of no destiny so exalted as to be enrolled among them. And if she succeeded, what would have mattered these long years of dull loneliness, of denial of all that is dear to the heart of a girl? Sometimes she even thought the tarrying of Trennahan mattered little; for there is no tyrant so jealous as Art.

Once she read her stories aloud to her mother; and Mrs. Yorba was pleased to observe that they were much better than she could have expected, but that on the whole she preferred "The Duchess." She had grown quite fond of her daughter, and often sat in her room while she wrote. The intimacy and isolation of the two women had made it easy and natural for Magdaléna to confide in her mother, but she was forced to confess that she had not inherited her critical faculty from her maternal parent. Nevertheless, she was glad of the meagre encouragement and plodded on.

XXIX

It was early in the fourth year that Henry James swooped down upon San Francisco. He arrived in the train of Helena's triumphant return, under her especial patronage. Not that a few choice spirits in California had not discovered James for themselves long since; but James as a definite entity, known and approved by Society, awaited the second advent of Helena. He immediately became the fad; rather, Society split into two factions and was threatened with disruption. One young woman of the disapproving camp even went so far as to call an ardent advocate a "Henry James fool." All of which was doubtless due to the fact that the traditions of action still lingered in California. Strangely enough, Tiny, who returned almost immediately after Helena, was one of the first to take Mr. James under her small but determined wing. She regarded well-read people as an unnecessary bore, and ambition of any sort as unsuited to the Land of the Poppy, but she had a feminine faith in exceptions, and joined the cult with something like enthusiasm. It was she who introduced him to Magdaléna.

Magdaléna cared nothing for American latter-day authors, and gave no heed to Helena's emphatic approval of Mr. James. In fact, she and Helena had so much else to talk about that they found little leisure for books. Helena had been abroad again, and the belle of a winter in Washington. She was more beautiful than ever, and, although somewhat subdued, was full of plans for the future. Her first ball--she arrived at the end of the winter season--determined that her supremacy, socially and sentimentally, was unshaken. Immediately after, she bought an old Spanish house in the northern redwoods and provided new surprises for her little world. But there is no more room for Helena in this chronicle. Perhaps, if history shapes itself around her, she may one day have a chronicle to herself.

Tiny called on Magdaléna one afternoon with two volumes of Henry James under her arm. She took to her toes as the front door closed, and ran down the long hall and up the stair to Magdaléna's room.

"I feel like a book agent," she said, trying not to pant, and hoping Magdaléna would go down to the door with her when she left. "But you really must read him, 'Léna. He's so fascinating: I think it's because nothing ever happens, and that's so like life. I think I must always have felt Henry Jamesish, and it seems to me that he is singularly like Menlo,--when Helena is not there,--just jogging along in aristocratic seclusion punctuated by the epigrams of Rose and Eugene Fort. I'm sure Mr. James could, write a novel of Menlo Park; he just revels in irradiating nothing with genius. There! I feel so guilty, for I really do love Menlo,--with intervals of Europe,--but I've been visiting Rose, and I'm afraid I'm plagiarising a little; you know I'm not one bit clever. Only I really feel so when I read Mr. James. And he'll be such company in Menlo this summer. Just think, I shall be all alone there, when I'm not visiting Helena or Caro. Is--is--" she glanced about fearfully--"is there no hope of dear Don Roberto relenting?"

"I am afraid not. But it is such a comfort to have you back. I heard you were engaged--to an Englishman, or something?"

Tiny blushed. She was on her way to a tea, and looked exquisitely pretty in a fawn-coloured _crêpe de chine_ embroidered with wild roses, and a bonnet of pink tulle crushed about her face. Magdaléna wondered why some man had not married her out of hand, then reflected that Tiny was likely to dispose of her own future.

"I'm not quite sure," said Miss Montgomery, looking innocently at a lithograph of the Virgin which still decorated the wall. "You see, he has a title, and it's so commonplace to marry a title. But if I decide to, I'll let you know the very first."

Shortly after she went away--and left Magdaléna alone with Henry James.

She took up one of the volumes. As she did so, something stirred in the cellars of her mind--beat its stiff wings against the narrow walls--struggled forward and upward.

She stood on the porch in the late evening: alone in a fog. Her young mind opened to literary desire--preceding it was a swift disturbing presentiment; it had recurred once, and again--but not for several years. What did it mean, here again? And what had Henry James to do with it? She dropped into a chair. Her hands trembled as they opened the book.

XXX

It was a week before she squarely faced the relation of Henry James to her own ambitions. Then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. The writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. It is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego.

Magdaléna realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression,--a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. Literature to her was, above all else, the art of words. Stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? The creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. She re-read her own efforts. They represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. The stories were wooden. Her work would always be wooden. There was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. After as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank. She put her manuscripts in the fire.

After that, life turned grey indeed. Her imagination might have gone into the flames with the stories, for her illusions about Trennahan fell to ashes coincidently. She no longer believed that he would return, that he would even write demanding her friendship. She could hardly recall his face; the sound of his voice was gone from her. Indubitably he had forgotten her long since. Why not? She had ascended above the rosy stratum of youth, where delusions were possible.

Then began a long struggle against despair and its terrible consequences. It was a summer of raging trades which seemed to lift the sand dunes from their foundations and hurl them through the choking city. She could take little exercise. The Library was her only resource, but one can read only so many hours a day. If she could but travel, as Helena did, when anything went wrong! Or if her uncle had only left her an income that she could expend in charity! Her sympathy for the poor had never ebbed, and she would have gladly spent her life in their service, although she doubted if they were more miserable than herself. It was true that she had enough to eat, a roof to her head, and clothes to wear,--extremely plain clothes; but that was all. A nun or a prisoner had as much.

There were times when she was threatened with a consuming hatred of life, and then she fled out into the dust and battled with the storms within and without; for her ideals were all that were left her. She knew the ugly potentialities in the depths of her ill-compounded nature: the day she ceased to be true to herself there would be a tragedy in that dark house on the hill. Sometimes she wondered toward what end she was persevering, striving to perfect the better part of her. A quarter of a century or more of meaningless earthly existence? A controvertible hereafter? But she ceased to analyse, knowing that it could lead nowhere until the human mind ceased to be human.

And one day, in the end of the summer, she lost her grip on herself.

For three days the trade-winds had raged; she had not been able to leave the house. Twice she had set forth, desperate with the nervous monotony of her hours, and been driven back by the blinding dust. It was on the third day that she happened to catch sight of herself in the glass. She saw her face plainer than ever, but her attention passed suddenly to her shoulders and rested there. They were bent. Her carriage was dejected, apathetic. The sluggish tide mounted slowly to her face as she realised that this physical manner must have fallen upon her gradually, and been worn for some time; and its significance. She made an effort to reassume her old erect haughty poise, which had been partly the manifest of inherent pride, partly of half-acknowledged defiance of the beauty-worship of the world. Her shoulders sank before the spine had risen to its perpendicular. What did it matter? Again she experienced that disintegration of will which once had left her at the mercy of that instinct for destruction which is one of the essential particles of the ego.

Her brain was almost torpid. The want of exhilarating exercise, the long dearth of companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. She noticed that her hands were not steady, and sat for hours, wondering what was coming upon her. She cared less and less.

Ah Kee tapped at her door. She replied that she did not want any dinner, loathing the unvarying bill-of-fare.

The hours dragged on, and darkness came; but she did not light the gas, whose jet was but a feeble point in these times, hardly worth the waste of a match. She strained her ears, fancied she heard whisperings in the hall below. If San Francisco's skeletons really were down there, she wished they would go in and throttle her father. He was the author of all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? Why should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his death would give her liberty?--a poignant happiness in itself. She wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? They rarely hanged anybody in California, never when there was gold to rattle contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her mother and herself? They would both be in an asylum for the mad, or dead before their time, unless he went soon; and their lives were of several times more value than his. They, at least, had ruined the lives of no one, and with his hoarded unsavoury millions they would gladly do good to hundreds.

She tiptoed out into the hall, and leaned over the circular railing, and peered down into the space below. Only an old-fashioned waxen taper burned in a cup of oil; it emitted a feeble and ghostly light. The large webs of the spiders quivered in a draught. They assumed strange distorted shapes and seemed to point long fingers at her father's door.

They are the ghosts that once animated the skeletons, she thought; and they think it time he joined them.

She stood there for a long while, her eyes narrowed in a hard searching regard; the trembling gloom with the tiny sallow flame in its middle suggested the purgatory of imaginative artists. Should she go down and thrust the dagger into his neck?

Her thoughts were torn apart by the abrupt loud shouts of the wind. She wondered if there were such winds anywhere else on earth, or if this were the voice of some fiend prisoned in the Pacific,--the spouse whom California had taken to her arms when the fires in her body were hewing and shattering and rehewing her, and divorced in an after-desire for beauty and peace.

Magdaléna went back to her room and turned the key in the drawer which contained the dagger.

"I must get out of this house," she said aloud, with the sensation of dragging her will from the depths of her brain and shaking it back to life. "If I don't, I'll be in an asylum to-morrow. Something is certainly wrong in my head."

She put on her jacket and hat with trembling fingers. Her nerves seemed fighting their way through her skin. Her ears were humming. Something had begun to pound in her brain.

She ran downstairs and let herself out, averting her eyes from her father's door. Her fingers were rigid, and curved.

As she reached the sidewalk, a squall caught and nearly carried her off her feet. It bellied her skirts and loosened her hair. She lost her breath and regained it with difficulty; she could hardly steer herself. But the wind filled her with a sudden wild exaltation, not of the soul, but of the worst of her passions,--those tangled, fighting, sternly governed passions of the cross-breed.

She cursed aloud. She let fly all the maledictions, English and Spanish, of which she had knowledge. The street was deserted. She raised her voice and pierced the gale, the furious energy of her words hissing like escaping steam. She raised her voice still higher and shrieked her profane arraignment of all things mundane in a final ecstasy of nervous abandonment.

When the passion and its voice were exhausted, her obsession had passed. Her head felt lighter, the danger of congestion was over; but her protest was the keener and bitterer. Her father's life was safe in her hands, but she had no desire to return to his house. She determined to walk until morning, and to drift, rudderless, in the great sea of the night.

She caught her skirts close to her body and walked rapidly to the brow of the hill. The twinkling lights were all below. The wrack of cloud torn by the wind into a thousand flapping sails skurried across a sky which the hidden moon patched with a hard angry silver. Far away and high in the storm the great cross on Calvary seemed dancing an inebriated jig above the ghostly tombs of Lone Mountain.

Magdaléna walked rapidly down the hill. Once or twice she paused before a house and stared at it. What secrets did it hold? What skeletons? Were any within so desperate as she? Why did they not come out and shriek with the storm? She pictured a sudden obsession of San Francisco: every door simultaneously flung open, every wretched inmate rushing forth to scream his protest against the injustice of life into the ecstatic fury of the elements.

High on a terrace, or rather an unlevelled angle of the hill, and reached by a long rickety flight of steps, was an old ugly wooden house. It was unpainted; the shutters were shaking on their rusty hinges; the chimneys had been blown off long since; but it had cost much gold in its time. It had been the home of a "Forty-niner," and he was dead and forgotten, his dust as easily accounted for as his winged gold. Doubtless every room had its patient skeleton, grinning eternally at the yellow lust of man.

As she passed Dupont Street, she paused again and regarded it steadily. Sheltered in the steep hillside, it took no note of the storm; its sidewalks were not empty, and its windows were broken bars of light. Magdaléna wondered if the painted creatures talking volubly behind the shutters were not happier and more normal than she. They were the rejected of their native boulevards, beyond a doubt, but they were free in their way, and they certainly were alive.

I am nothing, she thought; neither to myself, nor to any one else. I wonder will the wind blow me in there some night? What if it does?

But when a man started toward her with manifest intent to speak, she fled down the hill.

When she reached Kearney Street she turned without hesitation to the left, and walked toward those regions which are associated in the minds of every San Franciscan with lawlessness and crime. She had given a swift glance to the right before turning; the region of respectable shops and fashionable promenade was as black as a tunnel; the eccentric economy of the city forbade the light of street lamps when the moon was out, whether clouds accompanied her or not.

Ahead was a line of lights twisting and leaping in the wind,--the vagrant gas-jets before the row of cheap shops on the east side of the Plaza. Magdaléna hardly glanced at the medley of curious wares and faces as she hurried past; the wind was roaring about the open square, interfering with sight and hearing and headway. And beyond--her blood leaped to that mysterious disreputable region.

She left the Plaza and passing under the shelter of the heights upon which stood her home slackened her steps. There was a discordant crash of music in the crowded streets. Light was streaming from music-halls, above and below stairs, and from restaurants and saloons. But everybody seemed to be on the sidewalks. It was a strange crowd, and Magdaléna forgot herself for the moment: she had entered a new world, and her tortured soul lagged behind.

The riff-raff of the world was moving there, and when not apathetic they took their pleasures with drawn brows and eyes alert for a fight; but the only types Magdaléna recognised were the drunken sailors and the occasional blank-faced Chinaman who had strayed down from his quarter on the hill. There were dark-faced men who were doubtless French and Italian; what their calling was, no outsider could guess, but that it was evil no man could doubt; and there were many whose nationality had long since become as inarticulate as such soul they may have been born with. Many looked anæmic and consumptive, but the majority were highly coloured and frankly drunk. And if the men were forbidding, the women were appalling. There was no attempt at smartness in their attire; they were dowdy and frowsy, and even the young faces were old.

The din of voices, the medley of tongues and faces, the crash of music, the poisoned atmosphere, confused Magdaléna, and she turned precipitately into a restaurant. It was almost empty; she sat down before a dirty table and ordered a cup of coffee. The only waiter in attendance--the rest were probably in the street--was old and bleared of eye, but he stared hard at the new customer.

"You'd better git out of this," he said, as Magdaléna finished her unpleasant draught. "You ain't pretty, but you're a lady, and they don't understand that sort here. Have you got much money with you?"

"About a dollar, and I certainly do not give the impression of wealth. Most nursery maids are better dressed."

"You'd better git out, all the same."

But the strong coffee had gone to Magdaléna's head, and she cared little what became of her. Nevertheless, a moment later she was shrieking and struggling in the arms of a big golden-bearded Russian. She barely grasped the sense of what followed. There was a volley of screams and laughter; the man was cursing and gripping her with the arms of a grizzly. Then there was a flash of knives, and she was stumbling headlong through the crowd, hooted at and buffeted. But no one attempted to stop her, for a fight with bowie-knives was more interesting than a sallow-faced girl who had happened upon foreign territory. She ran up a dark side-street, and then, as her breath gave out and forced her to moderate her pace, she glanced repeatedly over her shoulder. No one was in pursuit, but it was some moments before she realised that it was not relief she experienced, but something akin to disappointment. She was in the ugliest mood of which her nature was capable, and that was saying much. With one exception, better forgotten, this blond ruffian who had insulted her was the only man who had ever desired her; doubtless, she reflected bitterly, even Trennahan might be excepted. And when an unprepossessing woman of starved affections and implacably controlled passions sees desire in the eyes of a man for the first time, her vanity of sex responds, if her passions do not.

She half turned back and stood looking down the hill to the brilliant noisy street.

Why should I not go back and live with him, and disappear from a world which takes no interest in me, and in which I am no earthly use? she thought. And no life could be worse than mine, nor more immoral, for that matter. I have never fulfilled a single one of the conditions for which woman was born, and I'd be more normal as that man's mistress, and less unhappy even if he beat me, which he probably would, than living the life of a blind mole underground.

Then she wondered who her deliverer was, and wondered if he too had wanted her. Some portion of the blackness in her soul receded suddenly, and she smiled and trembled slightly. Involuntarily her back straightened, and she lifted her head. But with the sudden rush of sexual pride the magnetism of its creators receded, and she turned her back on the flare below and continued to mount the hill. In a moment she turned into a badly lighted alley thinly peopled. Here there was but a tinkle of music, and it came from the guitar. Fat old women with black shawls pinned about their heads sat on the doorsteps of ramshackle houses talking to men whose flannel shirts revealed hairy chests. The women looked stupid, the men weather-beaten, but the prevailing expression was good-natured. In the middle of the street was a tamale stand surrounded by patrons. The aroma of highly seasoned cooking came from a restaurant at the foot of a rickety flight of steps. Every dilapidated window had its flower-box.

This, then, was Spanish town. Magdaléna had dreamed of it often, picturing it a blaze of colour, a moving picture-book, crowded with beautiful girls and handsome gaily attired men. There was not a young person to be seen. Nothing could be less picturesque, more sordid.

An old crone with a face like a withered apple followed her, whining for a nickel. The others stared at her with the stolid dignity of their race. She gave the woman the nickel and interrupted the invocation.

"Are there no girls here?"

"Girl come from other place sometimes, then have the baby and is old queeck. Si the señorita stay here, she have the baby and grow old too."

Magdaléna hastened on. She neither knew nor cared where she went, but after a time struck down the slope again, judging that she was beyond the centre of social activity. Once, at the corner of two sharply converging streets, she passed a house whose lighted windows were open, for the wind had gone and the night was hot. But she only stood for a moment. Fat Mexican women half dressed were lolling about, and the front door was open to many men. The women were not as evil appearing as the French dregs of Dupont Street, possibly because they wore flowers in their hair and looked more frankly sensual and less commercial. Again Magdaléna felt an almost irresistible attraction, but hastened on. Once, in a dark street, she was flung against a wall and her pockets turned inside out, but she made no protest and was allowed to go without further indignity. It was a woman who had robbed her, and Magdaléna, having come off with the mere loss of seventy cents, indulged in a pleasurable thrill of adventure.

After a time she found herself climbing a steep hill and felt a sudden desire to reach the top, and that the climb should be a long one. Here and there she passed a tumble-down house, but the rest of the hill under the brilliant moon showed bare and brown. From the other side came the sound of lapping waves, and she knew herself to be on Telegraph Hill.

She reached the top and sat down on the ground. The clouds had flown with the wind, and the moon revealed the quiet bay and the black masses of cliff and hill and mountain beyond. An occasional gust made a loud clatter in the rigging of the many crafts below, or an angry shout arose from the water-front; but otherwise the night from the summit of Telegraph Hill was peaceful and most beautiful.

Magdaléna, who loved Nature and had yielded to its influence many times in her life, made a deliberate attempt to absorb the peace and beauty of the night into her own scarred and troubled soul. But she gave up the attempt in a few moments. The fierceness of her mood had passed, and some of its blackness, but she was still bitter and hopeless. There was nothing to do but to face the problem of her life, and thinking was easier on these altitudes, where the air was fresh and salt, and the stars seemed close, than in the ill-ventilated prison which she called her home. She determined to remain until morning and to restore her brain to its normal condition, if possible.

She looked back upon the mental and moral inertia into which she had sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal instinct, with terror and horror. Before an hour had passed, she had herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to face her own soul, and she believed that she could put her character together again and accept the future without further luxation or debility of will. But she made no attempt to close her eyes to the ugly fact that in that future of interminable years there were only two small stars of hope; and it required an effort of imagination to drag them above the horizon,--her father's death and the return of Trennahan. Her father belonged to a long-lived race, and Trennahan during an absence of three years and some months had given no indication that he remembered her existence; moreover, he had gone into exile for love of another woman. But without the faint white twinkle of those stars the future would be not a blank, but an infernal abyss, which Magdaléna, without the society of her kind, without talent, without occupation, without religion, refused to contemplate. And she had all a woman's capacity for fooling herself with the will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

Her eyes had been clear and her logic relentless so long as the man had been within sight and touch, but his absence, combined with his abrupt and final eviction from the toils of the other woman, had lifted him from practical life into the realms of the imagination; in other words, he was no longer so much a man as an ideal,--a soul whom her own soul was free to await or pursue in that inner world where realities are bodiless and forgotten.

She longed for the old comfortable irresponsible sensuous embrace of the Church of Rome. Its lightest touch was hypnotic, its very breath a balm. Why, she wondered bitterly, could she not have been given less brains, or more? If her talents had been genuine, she would have had that magnificent independence of religion and worldly conditions which only art--and love--can create in the human mind. And if her logic had been a trifle less relentless, she would have had hours of ecstatic forgetfulness these last long years. Of course there was always the Almighty Power to whom one could pray, and who certainly could grant prayer if He chose. But it seemed to her an impertinence for ordinary insignificant beings to importune this remote and absolute God, so forbidding in His monotonous mystery. She had all the arrogance of intellect despite her remorseless limitations. Had she been granted the gift of creation,--in other words, a spark from the great creative force commanding the Universe,--she felt that she should have no hesitation in begging for further favours; a certain sense of kinship, of being in higher favour than the great congested mass, would have given her assurance and faith. She sighed for a new religion, for that prophet who must one day arise and rid the world of the abomination of dogma and sect, giving to the groping millions a simple belief, in which the fussiness, sentimentality, and cruelty of present religions would have no place.

She sat there until the dawn came, grey and appalling at first, then touching the bay and the dark heights with delicate colour, as the sun struggled out of the embrace of the ocean. She was obliged to walk home, as she had no money, and the long toilsome tramp in the wake of the eventful night gave her appetite and many hours of rest. When she awoke she felt that, whatever came, the most formidable crisis of her life had been safely passed.

XXXI

In the autumn she found an occupation which gave her a temporary place in the scheme of things. Mrs. Yorba fell ill. The sudden and complete change from a personage to a nobody, the long confinement,--she rarely put her foot outside the house lest her shabby clothes be remarked upon,--and a four years' course of sensational novels induced a nervous distemper. Magdaléna, hearing the sound of pacing footsteps in the hall one night, arose and opened her door. Mrs. Yorba, arrayed in a red flannel nightgown and a frilled nightcap, was walking rapidly up and down, talking to herself. Magdaléna persuaded her to go to bed, and the next morning sent for the doctor. He prescribed an immediate change of scene,--travel, if possible; if not, the country. Magdaléna undertook to carry the message to her father.

Knowing that a knock would evoke no response, she opened the door of the study and went in. Don Roberto, dirty, unshaven, looked like a wild man in a mountain cave; but his eyes were steady enough. His table and the floor about his chair were piled high with ledgers. On everything else the dust was inches thick, and the spiders had spun a shimmering web across one side of the room. It hung from the gas-rod like a piece of fairy tapestry, woven with red and gold here and there, where the sun's rays, scattering through the slats of the inside blinds, caressed it. On the mantel-piece, supported on its broken staff, was the big American flag which had floated above the house of Don Roberto Yorba for thirty years. It had been carefully washed, and although broken bits of spiders' weavings hung to its edges, there were none on its surface.

Magdaléna felt no desire to kiss her parent, although it was the first time for several years that she had stood in his presence. She disliked and despised him, and thought no less of herself for her repudiation. If she, a young, inexperienced, and lonely woman, could fight and conquer morbid fancies, why not he, who had been counted one of the keenest financial brains of the country? She felt thoroughly ashamed of her progenitor as she stood looking down upon the little dirty shrunken shambling figure.

"Well?" growled Don Roberto, "what you want?"

"My mother is very ill. This life is killing her. The doctor says she must have a change."

"All go to die sometime. What difference now or bimeby?"

"Will you let us go to Santa Barbara to visit aunt?"

"Si she send you the moneys, I no care what you do with it. I no give you one cents."

"Very well; I shall ask my aunt."

But Mrs. Yorba declared that she would not go to Santa Barbara: she detested her sister-in-law, and would accept no favours from her, nor be forced into her society. There was nothing for Magdaléna to do but to nurse her, and a most exasperating invalid she proved. Nevertheless, Magdaléna, although a part of her duties was to read her mother's favourite literature aloud by the hour, was almost grateful for the change. She seldom found time for her daily walk, but at least she had little time to think.

When Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Geary, and Mrs. Brannan returned to town, they came frequently to sit with the invalid, and cheered her somewhat with talk of the coming summer, when they should take her down to their own houses in Menlo.

"And I shall go," said Mrs. Yorba to her daughter, "if I _haven't_ a decent rag to my back. They think nothing of that; I was a fool not to go before. And I'm going to get well--against the time when that old fiend dies. There! I never thought I'd say that, for I was brought up in the fear of the Lord, but saying it is little different from thinking it, after all. I've been thinking it for two solid years. California's not New England, anyhow. When I do get the money, won't I scatter it! I've been economical all my life, for I had it in my blood, and it was my duty, as your father wished it; as long as he did his duty by me, I was more than willing to do mine by him: he can't deny it. But we all know what reaction means, and it has set in in me. When I am my own mistress, I'll give three balls and two dinners a week. I'll have the finest carriages and horses ever seen in California. I'll have four trousseaux a year from Paris, and I'll go to New York myself and buy the most magnificent diamonds Tiffany's got. I'll refurnish this house and Fair Oaks. The walls shall be frescoed, and every stick in them will come from New York--"

She paused abruptly, springing to her elbow. The door was ajar. Through the aperture came a long low chuckle. Magdaléna jumped to her feet, flung the door to, and locked it.

"Do you think he's gone mad at last?" gasped Mrs. Yorba.

"It sounded like it."

"For Heaven's sake, don't leave me for a minute. You must sleep here at night. There's a cot somewhere,--in the attic, I think, if the rats haven't eaten it. What a life to live!" She fell to weeping, as she frequently did in these days. Suddenly her face brightened. "If he should make a will disinheriting us, we could easily enough prove him insane after the way he's been acting these four years. Thank Heaven, this is California! General William could break any will that ever was made."

Mrs. Yorba took an opiate and fell asleep. Magdaléna went out, locking the door behind her. She determined to ascertain at once if her father was insane. If he was, he should be confined in two of the upper rooms with a keeper. The world should know nothing of his misfortune; but it would be absurd for herself and her mother to live in a constant state of physical terror.

As she descended the stair, the door of her father's study opened abruptly and a man shot out as if violently propelled from behind. The door was slammed to immediately.

Magdaléna ran downstairs and toward the stranger. He was a tall man greatly bowed, and as she approached him she saw that he was old and wore a long white beard. His head was large and suggested nobility and intellect; but the eyes were bleared, the flesh of the face loose and discoloured, and he was shabby and dirty. He looked like a fallen king.

"Was--was--my father rude?" asked Magdaléna. "He is not very well. Perhaps I can do something." The man appealed to her strangely, and she had a dollar in her purse.

"We were great friends in our boyhood and youth," replied the stranger. He spoke with an accent, but his English was unbroken. "And he has been my guest many times. There was a time when he thought it an honour to know me. When the Americans came, everything changed. My career closed, for I would have nothing to do with them. I had held the highest offices under the Mexican government. I could not stoop to hold office under the usurpers--many of whom I would not have employed as servants. Then they took my lands,--everything. But I am detaining you, señorita."

"Oh, no, no, indeed! How could they take your lands? Who are you? Tell me everything."

"They 'squatted,' many of them, almost up to my door. The only law we could appeal to was American law, and California was a hell of sharpers at that time. It is bad enough now, but it was worse then. And then came the great drought of '64, in which we lost all our cattle. We never recovered from that, for we mortgaged our lands to the Americans to get money to live on with,--everything was three prices then; and when the time came they foreclosed, for we never had the money to pay. And we were great gamblers, señorita, and so were the Americans--and far better ones than we were. We were only made for pleasure and plenty, to live the life of grandees who had little use for money, and scorned it. When the time came for us to pit ourselves against sordid people, we crumbled like old bones. Your father has been very fortunate: he had a clever man to teach him to circumvent other clever men. Years ago, when I was prouder than I am now, I put my pride in my pocket and wrote, asking him for help. I wanted a small sum to pay off the mortgage on a ranchita, upon which I might have ended my days in peace, for it was very productive. He never answered. To-day I came to ask him for money to buy bread. He roared at me like a bull, and vowed he'd blow my brains out if I ever entered his house again. He looks like--" He paused abruptly. There was much of the old-time courtliness in his manner.

"I--I--am so sorry. And I have little money to spend. If you will leave me your name and address, I will send you something on the first of each month; and if--if ever I have more I will take care of you--of all of you. I suppose there are many others."

"There are indeed, señorita."

"Some day I will ask you for all of their names. And yours?"

He gave it. It was a name famous in the brief history of old California,--a name which had stood for splendid hospitality, for state and magnificence, for power and glory. It was the name of one of her beloved heroes. She had written his youthful romance; she had described the picturesque fervour of his wooing, the pomp of his wedding; of all those heroes he had been the best beloved, the most splendid. And she met him,--a broken-down old drunkard, in the dusty gloom of an old maniac's wooden "palace," in the fashionable quarter of a city which had never heard his name.

"O God!" she said. "O God!" and she was glad that she had burned her manuscripts. She took the dollar from her pocket and gave it to him.

He accepted it eagerly. "God bless you, señorita!" he said. "And you can always hear of me at the Yosemite Saloon, Castroville."

He passed out, neglecting to shut the door behind him, but Magdaléna did not notice the unaccustomed rift of light. She sank into a chair against the wall and wept heavily. They were the last tears she shed over her fallen idols. When the wave had broken, she reflected that she was glad to know of the distress of her people; it should be her lifework to help them. When she came to her own she would buy them each a little ranch and see that they passed the rest of their lives in comfort.

She leaned forward and listened intently. Loud mutterings proceeded from her father's room. She wondered if there was a policeman in the street. She and her mother were very unprotected. The only man in the house besides her father was the Chinaman, and Chinamen are as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. Don Roberto had ordered the telephone and messenger call removed years ago. The sounds rose to a higher register. Magdaléna, straining her ears, heard, delivered in rapid defiant tones, the familiar national cry, "Hip-hip-hooray!"

She went over softly, and put her ear to the thick door. The tones of the old man's voice were broken, as if by muscular exertion, and accompanied by a curious bumping. Magdaléna understood in a moment. He was striding up and down the room, waving the American flag, and shouting, "Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-_hooray_! hoo_ray_! hoo_ray_! hoo_ray_!"

She ran down the hall to summon Ah Kee and send him for a doctor, but before she reached the bell she heard the front door close, and turned swiftly. A man had entered.

She went forward in some indignation. So deep was the gloom of the hall that she could distinguish nothing beyond the facts that the intruder was tall and slight, and that he wore a light suit of clothes. When she had approached within a few feet of him, she saw that he was Trennahan.

For the moment she thought it was the soul of the man, so ghostly he looked in that dim light, in that large silence.

His first remark was reassuring: "I rang twice; but as no one came, and the door was open, I walked in,--as you see."

"We have so few servants now. Won't you come and sit down?"

He followed her down to the reception-room. She jerked aside the curtains, careless of the bad house-keeping the light would reveal. It streamed in upon him. He was deeply tanned and indescribably improved.

They sat down opposite each other. Magdaléna, recalling her tears, placed her chair against the light. "When did you get back?" she asked.

"The ship docked an hour ago."

"You look very well. Have you been enjoying yourself?"

"I have been occupied, and useful--I hope. At least, I have collected some data and made some observations which may be new to the world of Science. I found the old love very absorbing. And, you will hardly credit it, I have lived quite an impersonal life."

"Have you come back to California again because you think it a good place to die in?"

"I came back to California, because it is a good place to write my book in, and because you are here."

"Ah!"

"Don't misunderstand me. I am not so conceited as to imagine that I can have you for the asking. But--listen to me: I had a brief but very genuine madness. When I recovered I knew what I had th--lost. I argued--even during my convalescence--that I had been wholly right in believing that you were the one woman for me to marry, and, that fact established, you must believe it no less than I. But for a long time I was ashamed to come back, or to write. Later, I went where it was impossible. Moreover, in solitude a man comes into very close knowledge of himself. After a few months of it I knew that I should never be contented with mere existence again. I determined to take advantage of what might be the last chance granted me to make anything of my life; I had thrown away a good many chances. I also argued that if you loved me, you would wait for me; that you were not the sort to marry for any reason but one. At least, perhaps you will give me another trial."

"I shall marry you, I suppose; I have wanted to so long, and I never had any pride where you were concerned. A few months ago I should have flown into your arms; and I had felt sure that you would return. But lately I have not been able to care about anything. I am not the least bit excited that you are here. It merely seems quite natural and rather pleasant."

"Is anything the matter?" he asked anxiously. "You look very thin and worn, and the house--it was like entering the receiving vault on Lone Mountain. I thought when I came in that you were having a funeral, at least."

"It has been like that for four years. Uncle died, and papa was afraid to trust himself in the world for fear he would relapse into his natural instincts. So he shut himself up, makes us live on next to nothing, and of course we go nowhere, for we have no clothes. Mamma has been ill with nervous prostration for months, and now I feel sure that papa has gone insane. I have only spoken to him once in four years; but I have been certain that he would lose his mind finally, and I have just discovered that he is quite mad."

"Good God! We'll be married to-morrow. I never imagined your father would hit upon any new eccentricities. You poor little hermit! I fancied you going to parties and plodding at your stories. I never dreamed that you were shut up in a dungeon. I shall see that you are happy hereafter."

"I feel sad and worn out. I don't think I can ever feel much of anything again."

"Oh, you'll get over that," he replied cheerfully; he was as practical as ever. "What you want is plenty of sun and fresh air and a rest from your family. If your father is insane, he'll go into an asylum; and a rest cure is the place for your mother. That will dispose of her while we are taking our honeymoon in the redwoods. Do you think you could stand camping out?"

"I could stand anything so long as it was the country once more," she said, with her first flash of enthusiasm. "But there is something I should tell you. Perhaps after you hear it you won't want to marry me. I tried to kill Helena once."

"You did what?" he said, staring at her.

"She came to me just after leaving you, on the night of your last interview. I was very much worked up before she came, had been for a long while; and when she told me that she had treated you badly and had thrown you over, after taking you away from me, I suddenly wanted to kill her, and I took my dagger out of the drawer beside me. It was very dark, but she had an instinct, and she jumped up and ran away. I never knew I could feel so; but every bit of blood in my body seemed shrieking in my head, and if she had not gone I should have jumped on her and hacked her to bits. I must go up to my mother now. You can think it over and come back again."

"I don't need to think it over," he said, smiling. "That was all you needed to make you quite perfect. You are a wonderful example of misdirected energies. Where is your father? I will go and look after him at once."

He took her suddenly in his arms and compelled her to kiss him; and then Magdaléna knew how glad she was that he had come.

She went with him to the door of the study.

"He is quiet," she whispered. "Perhaps he is asleep."

She left him and went down the hall, turning to wave her hand to him. Trennahan knocked. There was no answer. He opened the door softly, then gave a swift glance over his shoulder, entered hurriedly, and closed the door behind him.

Suspended from the gas pipe, which was bent and leaking, was Don Roberto. The light was dim. The purple face on the languidly revolving body was barely visible; but as it turned slowly to the door, it occupied a definite place among the shadows. Trennahan flung back the curtains and opened the window, closing the lower inside blinds. A cloud hurried across the face of the sun, as if light had no place in that ghastly room. About the limp body and sprawling hands clung the delicate prismatic tapestry of the spiders. It was rent in twain, and it quivered, and threatened to drop and trail upon the floor. The little weavers were racing about, full of anger and consternation, bent on repair. A number had already gathered up the broken strands and were fastening them across the body. Had Don Roberto remained undiscovered for twenty-four hours, he might have been wrought into the tissue of that beautiful delicate web, a grotesque intruder over whom the spiders would doubtless have held long and puzzled counsel.

The cloud passed. The sun caught a brilliant line of colour. Trennahan went forward hastily, and examined the long knotted strip between the body and the ceiling.

Don Roberto had hanged himself with the American flag.

THE END

* * * * *

_By the Same Author._

Patience Sparhawk and Her Times.

His Fortunate Grace.

The Doomswoman. (Companion volumes to "The Californians.")

A Whirl Asunder.

American Wives and English Husbands.

A Daughter of the Vine (ready shortly).

Some Novels Published by John Lane

An African Millionaire By Grant Allen

Patience Sparhawk and Her Times By Gertrude Atherton

The Californians By Gertrude Atherton

A Man from the North By E. A. Bennett

Ordeal by Compassion By Vincent Brown

Grey Weather By John Buchan

Carpet Courtship By Thomas Cobb

A King with Two Faces By M. E. Coleridge

A Bishop's Dilemma By Ella D'Arcy

Middle Greyness By A. J. Dawson

Mere Sentiment By A. J. Dawson

Symphonies By George Egerton

Fantasias By George Egerton

The Martyr's Bible By George Fifth

A Celibate's Wife By Herbert Flowerdew

When All Men Starve By Charles Gleig

The Edge of Honesty By Charles Gleig

Comedies and Errors By Henry Harland

The Child Who Will Never Grow Old By K. Douglas King

Weighed in the Balance By Harry Lander

The Quest of the Golden Girl By Richard Le Gallienne

The Romance of Zion Chapel By Richard Le Gallienne

Derelicts By W. J. Locke

Idols By W. J. Locke

Mutineers By A. E. J. Legge

The Spanish Wine By Frank Mathew

A Child in the Temple By Frank Mathew

Regina By Herman Sudermann

The Tree of Life By Netta Syrett

Galloping Dick By H. B. Marriott Watson

The Heart of Miranda By H. B. Marriott Watson