.

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 Magdalena, he might have been a sultan and she his
meanest slave. But Magdalena 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.
Magdalena 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. Magdalena 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 Magdalena 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
Magdalena 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 franti