as he had seen her then, more beautiful and fascinating than ever in her
black dress, and the pensive grace of refined suffering and restrained
passion in her delicate face. He remembered, too, how the shock of
her disclosure--the knowledge that she had been his old friend's
wife--seemed only to accent her purity and suffering and his own wilful
recklessness, and how it had stirred all the chivalry, generosity, and
affection of his easy nature to take the whole responsibility of this
innocent but compromising intrigue on his own shoulders. He had had no
self-accusing sense of disloyalty to Blandford in his practical nature;
he had never suspected the shy, proper girl of being his wife; he was
willing to believe now, that had he known it, even that night, he would
never have seen her again; he had been very foolish; he had made this
poor woman participate in his folly; but he had never been dishonest or
treacherous in thought or action. If Blandford had lived, even he
would have admitted it. Yet he was guiltily conscious of a material
satisfaction in Blandford's death, without his wife's religious
conviction of the saving graces of predestination.

They had been married quietly when the two years of her widowhood
had expired; his former relations with her husband and the straitened
circumstances in which Blandford's death had left her having been deemed
sufficient excuse in the eyes of North Liberty for her more worldly
union. They had come to California at her suggestion "to begin life
anew," for she had not hesitated to make this dislocation of all her
antecedent surroundings as a reason as well as a condition of this
marriage. She wished to see the world of which he had been a passing
glimpse; to expand under his protection beyond the limits of her
fettered youth. He had bought this old Spanish estate, with its near
vineyard and its outlying leagues covered with wild cattle, partly from
that strange contradictory predilection for peaceful husbandry common to