, scratching my feeble little cane into the
earth, "is she that?"

Of all that had been denied him in the recent general conversation, of
colossal hunks of salt, of grasshoppers "no larger than Dorking hens,"
of fishes, women, horses fabulous, I listened, rapt with wonder and
admiration.

The sun went down, the moon arose, and still I listened. I was not
weary, I was not hungry; I was absorbed in sincere and awful attention.
But the world is callous and cold, and I shall not repeat those tales.

The world is callous and cold; but, as the shifty spectre at last
pointed me, unwilling, homeward, he murmured, with tears in his eyes:
"I never found sech an intellergent listener as you be--not in the
whole length and breadth of Californy."

VIII

"VESTY 'S MARRIED"

"Vesty 's married Gurd! Vesty 's gone and got married to Gurd!" said
the children, big and joyful with news, on their way to school.

Yes, that was what she had done! I leaned heavily for a moment where I
stood. That was Vesty!

Oh, child-madness! Sweet, lost child! Oh, pity of the world! and I
crawling on with such a hurt; I did not think that should have wrung me
so.

I was getting near her door; not anywhere else could I have gone. She
would be at the Rafes' cottage now--so easily do the Basin brides move,
without wedding journey or trousseau.

The wash-tubs and cooking-stove stood at one end of the long,
low-raftered room, the cabinet organ and violins at the other. Captain
Rafe and the boys were out, hauling their sea-traps, and Vesty had been
doing the washing that they were wont to do for themselves; the mother,
like her own, being dead.

The room was nice as I had never seen it before, and Vesty was putting
some pitiful little ornaments to rights at the cabinet-organ end.

She turned to me with so strange and febrile a look, yet with so wild
and startled a welcome in her eyes.

"Hush!" I said. "You wanted me, child; I am here."

I saw that she had turned to lean against the organ, and that she was
shaken with sobs.

"What have you done, Vesty? Wicked and false beyond any woman I
know--_you_!"

"Have you seen him?" she sobbed.

"No, I have not seen Notely. You were married only last night."

"I wrote to him. There was only one way to save Notely from marrying
me--only one way."

"You might have waited."

"Notely would never have waited. Notely meant to marry me."

"You should have married him, and not been fal