o the dark-green canada was a
broad cataract of crimson poppies. Everywhere where water had stood,
great patches of color had taken its place. It seemed as if the rains
had ceased only that the broken heavens might drop flowers.

Never before had its beauty--a beauty that seemed built upon a cruel,
youthful, obliterating forgetfulness of the past--struck Clarence as
keenly as when he had made up his mind that he must leave the place
forever. For the tale of his mischance and ill-fortune, as told by
Hopkins, was unfortunately true. When he discovered that in his desire
to save Peyton's house by the purchase of the Sisters' title he himself
had been the victim of a gigantic fraud, he accepted the loss of the
greater part of his fortune with resignation, and was even satisfied by
the thought that he had at least effected the possession of the property
for Mrs. Peyton. But when he found that those of his tenants who had
bought under him had acquired only a dubious possession of their
lands and no title, he had unhesitatingly reimbursed them for their
improvements with the last of his capital. Only the lawless Gilroy had
good-humoredly declined. The quiet acceptance of the others did
not, unfortunately, preclude their settled belief that Clarence had
participated in the fraud, and that even now his restitution was making
a dangerous precedent, subversive of the best interests of the State,
and discouraging to immigration. Some doubted his sanity. Only one,
struck with the sincerity of his motive, hesitated to take his money,
with a look of commiseration on his face.

"Are you not satisfied?" asked Clarence, smiling.

"Yes, but"--

"But what?"

"Nothin'. Only I was thinkin' that a man like you must feel awful
lonesome in Calforny!"

Lonely he was, indeed; but his loneliness was not the loss of fortune
nor what it might bring. Perhaps he had never fully realized his wealth;
it had been an accident rather than a custom of his life, and when it
had failed in the only test he had made of its power, it is to be feared
that he only sentimentally regretted it. It was too early yet for him
to comprehend the veiled blessings of the catastrophe in its merciful
disruption of habits and ways of life; his loneliness was still the
hopeless solitude left by vanished ideals and overthrown idols. He was
satisfied that he had never cared for Susy, but he still cared for the
belief that he had.

After the discovery of Pedro's body that