ther, Eleanor learned the art and practice of growing
apricots and prunes. Lady of her small manor, she made a business of
it; got it to pay after the second year. Billy Gray never reformed; no
one but Eleanor ever expected that he would. He smuggled whisky in; he
stole away to get it; once he led the Judge and Eleanor a chase
through his old haunts in San Francisco until they found him, broken
all to pieces, in the county hospital.

That incident--it appeared that he had been beaten by a squad of
drunken soldiers from the Presidio--was the breaking strain. His
constitution gone, his mind and body weakened. For twenty years, no
one had ever heard him speak the name of that Saxon Alice whose death
was the death of his soul. Now, he began suddenly to babble to his
daughter of her mother. In his last delirium, he called her "Alice."

When he was dead and buried, Eleanor went on for a year through her
accustomed routine of the ranch, letting life flow in again. Tired at
twenty-two, she overstated the feeling to herself after the manner of
youth, and thought that heart and sense and feeling were dead in her.

In all the years of passage from girlhood to womanhood, she had lived
alone with that dipsomaniac, seeing only such society as frequented
her aunt's lawn, and little of that. Books, and such training in life
as they give, she had known; but she had never known a flirtation, a
follower or a lover. On the day when Bertram Chester went with her to
tame the bull, she was as one who steps from the door of a convent.

CHAPTER IV

As she left the Tiffany gate and emerged into the main road between
Santa Clara and Los Gatos, Eleanor raised her serviceable khaki-brown
parasol. She was walking directly toward the setting sun, which poured
into her eyes; yet she dropped the sunshade behind her head as though
to shield herself against an approach from the rear. No one followed;
she had walked to the next fence corner before she assured herself of
that, dared to shift that feminine buckler against the eye of the sun,
to slacken her pace, and to muse on an afternoon whose events, so
quiet, so undramatic, and yet so profoundly significant, buzzed still
in her head. As she thought on them, other things came into her mind
as momentous and worthy of attention before the jump of the great
event--that moment alone with Bertram Chester, that panic of
unaccountable fear. Slow to anger as much by a native and hidden
sweetness as