strangers for a day or two, and listen to as
little news as a woman possibly can." He laughed again, waved her a
half-gallant, half-military salute, and was gone. The question she had
been trying to frame, regarding the probability of communication with
her husband, remained unasked. At least she had saved her pride before
him.

Addressing herself to the care of her narrow household, she mechanically
put away the few things she had brought with her, and began to readjust
the scant furniture. She was a little discomposed at first at the
absence of bolts, locks, and even window-fastenings until assured, by
Concha's evident inability to comprehend her concern, that they were
quite unknown at Los Cuervos. Her slight knowledge of Spanish was barely
sufficient to make her wants known, so that the relief of conversation
with her only companion was debarred her, and she was obliged to content
herself with the sapless, crackling smiles and withered genuflexions
that the old woman dropped like dead leaves in her path. It was staring
noon when, the house singing like an empty shell in the monotonous
wind, she felt she could stand the solitude no longer, and, crossing the
glaring patio and whistling corridor, made her way to the open gateway.

But the view without seemed to intensify her desolation. The broad
expanse of the shadowless plain reached apparently to the Coast Range,
trackless and unbroken save by one or two clusters of dwarfed oaks,
which at that distance were but mossy excrescences on the surface,
barely raised above the dead level. On the other side the marsh took
up the monotony and carried it, scarcely interrupted by undefined
water-courses, to the faintly marked out horizon line of the remote bay.
Scattered and apparently motionless black spots on the meadows that gave
a dreary significance to the title of "the Crows" which the rancho bore,
and sudden gray clouds of sand-pipers on the marshes, that rose and
vanished down the wind, were the only signs of life. Even the white sail
of the early morning was gone.

She stood there until the aching of her straining eyes and the
stiffening of her limbs in the cold wind compelled her to seek the
sheltered warmth of the courtyard. Here she endeavored to make friends
with a bright-eyed lizard, who was sunning himself in the corridor; a
graceful little creature in blue and gold, from whom she felt at other
times she might have fled, but whose beauty and harmlessness solit