The two men kept their secret. Mr. Poindexter convinced Mrs. Tucker that
the sale of Los Cuervos could not be effected until the notoriety of her
husband's flight had been fairly forgotten, and she was forced to accept
her fate. The sale of her diamonds, which seemed to her to have realized
a singularly extravagant sum, enabled her to quietly reinstate the
Pattersons in the tienda and to discharge in full her husband's
liabilities to the rancheros and his humbler retainers.

Meanwhile the winter rains had ceased. It seemed to her as if the clouds
had suddenly one night struck their white tents and stolen away, leaving
the unvanquished sun to mount the vacant sky the next morning alone,
and possess it thenceforward unchallenged. One afternoon she thought
the long sad waste before her window had caught some tint of gayer
color from the sunset; a week later she found it a blazing landscape of
poppies, broken here and there by blue lagoons of lupine, by pools of
daisies, by banks of dog-roses, by broad outlying shores of dandelions
that scattered their lavish gold to the foot of the hills, where the
green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the darker crest
of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She
had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian
Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like
prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath
her feet; the few circuits of a plough around the outlying corral were
enough to call out a jungle growth of giant grain that almost hid the
low walls of the hacienda. In this glorious fecundity of the earth,
in this joyous renewal of life and color, in this opulent youth and
freshness of soil and sky, it alone remained, the dead and sterile Past,
left in the midst of buoyant rejuvenescence and resurrection, like an
empty churchyard skull upturned on the springing turf. Its bronzed adobe