oung stranger, who, as schoolmaster
in the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent a scant capital
of education. In obedience to the unwritten law of the West, after the
marriage was celebrated the doors of the ancestral home cheerfully
opened, and bride and bridegroom issued forth, without regret and
without sentiment, to seek the further possibilities of a life beyond
these already too familiar voices. With their departure for California
as Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Tucker, the parental nest in the Blue Grass
meadows knew them no more.

They submitted with equal cheerfulness to the privations and excesses
of their new conditions. Within three years the schoolmaster developed
into a lawyer and capitalist, the Blue Grass bride supplying a grace
and ease to these transitions that were all her own. She softened the
abruptness of sudden wealth, mitigated the austerities of newly
acquired power, and made the most glaring incongruity picturesque. Only
one thing seemed to limit their progress in the region of these
possibilities. They were childless. It was as if they had exhausted the
future in their own youth, leaving little or nothing for another
generation to do.

* * * * *

A southwesterly storm was beating against the dressing-room windows of
their new house in one of the hilly suburbs of San Francisco, and
threatening the unseasonable frivolity of the stucco ornamentation of
cornice and balcony. Mrs. Tucker had been called from the contemplation
of the dreary prospect without by the arrival of a visitor. On entering
the drawing-room she found him engaged in a half admiring, half
resentful examination of its new furniture and hangings. Mrs. Tucker at
once recognized Mr. Calhoun Weaver, a former Blue Grass neighbor; with
swift feminine intuition she also felt that his slight antagonism was
likely to be transferred from her furniture to herself. Waiving it with
the lazy amiability of Southern indifference, she welcomed him by the
familiarity of a Christian name.

"I reckoned that mebbee you opined old Blue Grass friends wouldn't
naturally hitch on to them fancy doins," he said, glancing around the
apartment to avoid her clear eyes, as if resolutely setting himself
against the old charm of her manner as he had against the more recent
glory of her surroundings, "but I thought I'd just drop in for the sake
of old times."

"Why shouldn't you, Cal?" said Mrs. Tucker with a frank smile.