all
day, thinking of it, with the wind driving the sand against the window,
and nothing to look at but those white tombs in Lone Mountain Cemetery,
and those white caps that might be gravestones too, and not a soul to
talk to or even see pass by until I feel as if I were dead and buried
also. If you were me--you--you--you--couldn't help crying too!"

Indeed he was very near it now. For as he caught her in his arms,
suddenly seeing with a lover's sympathy and the poet's swifter
imagination all that she had seen and even more, he was aghast at the
vision conjured. In her delicate health and loneliness how dreadful must
have been these monotonous days, and this glittering, cruel sea! What
a selfish brute he was! Yet as he stood there holding her, silently and
rhythmically marking his tenderness and remorseful feelings by rocking
her from side to side like a languid metronome, she quietly disengaged
her wet lashes from his shoulder and said in quite another tone:--

"So they were all at Tasajara last week?"

"Who, dear?"

"Your father and sisters."

"Yes," said John Milton, hesitatingly.

"And they've taken back your sister after her divorce?"

The staring obtrusiveness of this fact apparently made her husband's
bright sympathetic eye blink as before.

"And if you were to divorce me, YOU would be taken back too," she
added quickly, suddenly withdrawing herself with a pettish movement and
walking to the window.

But he followed. "Don't talk in that way, Loo! Don't look in that way,
dear!" he said, taking her hand gently, yet not without a sense of some
inconsistency in her conduct that jarred upon his own simple directness.
"You know that nothing can part us now. I was wrong to let my little
girl worry herself all alone here, but I--I--thought it was all so--so
bright and free out on this hill,--looking far away beyond the Golden
Gate,--as far as Cathay, you know, and such a change from those dismal
flats of Tasajara and that awful stretch of tules. But it's all right
now. And now that I know how you feel, we'll go elsewhere."

She did not reply. Perhaps she found it difficult to keep up her injured
attitude in the face of her husband's gentleness. Perhaps her attention
had been attracted by the unusual spectacle of a stranger, who had just
mounted the hill and was now slowly passing along the line of
cottages with a hesitating air of inquiry. "He may be looking for this
house,--for you," she said in an entirely