ether there was some
strange suggestion in his mud-stained garments and weak deprecating
smile, or whether it was the outcome of some desperate struggle within
her, there was that in her face that changed his smile into a
frightened cry for pardon, as he ran and fell on his knees at her feet.
But even as he did so her stern look vanished, and with her arm around
him she bent over him and mingled her tears with his.

"I heard it all, Mag dearest! All! Forgive me! I have been
crazy!--wild!--I will reform!--I will be better! I will never disgrace
you again, Mag! Never, never! I swear it!"

She reached down and kissed him. After a pause, a weak boyish smile
struggled into his face.

"You heard what he said of HER, Mag. Do you think it might be true?"

She lifted the damp curls from his forehead with a sad half-maternal
smile, but did not reply.

"And Mag, dear, don't you think YOU were a little--just a little--hard
on HIM? No! Don't look at me that way, for God's sake! There, I
didn't mean anything. Of course you knew best. There, Maggie dear,
look up. Hark there! Listen, Mag, do!"

They lifted their eyes to the dim distance seen through the open door.
Borne on the fading light, and seeming to fall and die with it over
marsh and river, came the last notes of the bugle from the Fort.

"There! Don't you remember what you used to say, Mag?"

The look that had frightened him had quite left her face now.

"Yes," she smiled, laying her cold cheek beside his softly. "Oh yes!
It was something that came and went, 'Like a song'--'Like a song.'"

A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE FOOTHILLS.

I.

As Father Felipe slowly toiled up the dusty road towards the Rancho of
the Blessed Innocents, he more than once stopped under the shadow of a
sycamore to rest his somewhat lazy mule and to compose his own
perplexed thoughts by a few snatches from his breviary. For the good
padre had some reason to be troubled. The invasion of Gentile
Americans that followed the gold discovery of three years before had
not confined itself to the plains of the Sacramento, but stragglers had
already found their way to the Santa Cruz Valley, and the seclusion of
even the mission itself was threatened. It was true that they had not
brought their heathen engines to disembowel the earth in search of
gold, but it was rumored that they had already speculated upon the
agricultural productiveness of the land, and had espied "the fatness
thereo