n Jose to get the money for
us to go away with. It was Spencer's idea"--

"You lie!" said Mrs. Tucker.

There was a dead silence. The wrathful blood that had quickly mounted
to Mrs. Baxter's cheek, to Patterson's additional bewilderment, faded
as quickly. She did not lift her eyes again to Mrs. Tucker's, but,
slowly raising herself from her seat, said, "I wish to God I did lie;
but it's true. And it's true that I never touched a cent of the money,
but gave it all to him!" She laid her hand on Patterson's arm, and
said, "Come! let us go," and led him a few steps toward the gateway.
But here Patterson paused, and again passed his hand over his
melancholy brow. The necessity of coherently and logically closing the
conversation impressed itself upon his darkening mind. "Then you don't
happen to have heard anything of Spencer?" he said sadly, and vanished
with Mrs. Baxter through the gate.

Left alone to herself, Mrs. Tucker raised her hands above her head with
a little cry, interlocked her rigid fingers, and slowly brought her
palms down upon her upturned face and eyes, pressing hard as if to
crush out all light and sense of life before her. She stood thus for a
moment motionless and silent, with the rising wind whispering without
and flecking her white morning dress with gusty shadows from the arbor.
Then, with closed eyes, dropping her hands to her breast, still
pressing hard, she slowly passed them down the shapely contours of her
figure to the waist, and with another cry cast them off as if she were
stripping herself of some loathsome garment. Then she walked quickly to
the gateway, looked out, returned to the corridor, unloosening and
taking off her wedding-ring from her finger as she walked. Here she
paused, then slowly and deliberately rearranged the chairs and adjusted
the gay-colored rugs that draped them, and quietly reentered her
chamber.

Two days afterwards the sweating steed of Captain Poindexter was turned
loose in the corral, and a moment later the captain entered the
corridor. Handing a letter to the decrepit Concha, who seemed to be
utterly disorganized by its contents and the few curt words with which
it was delivered, he gazed silently upon the vacant bower, still fresh
and redolent with the delicacy and perfume of its graceful occupant,
until his dark eyes filled with unaccustomed moisture. But his reverie
was interrupted by the sound of jingling spurs without, and the old
humor struggled back into