of his silent and subdued welcome. He had that
piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many
charming women--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference
it has learned to expect. She approached him smiling in her turn,
meeting the sublime patience of being unloved with the equally resigned
patience of being loved, and feeling that comforting sense of virtue
which might become a bore, but never a self-reproach. For the rest, she
was prettier than ever; her five years of expanded life had slightly
rounded the elongated oval of her face, filled up the ascetic hollows
of her temples, and freed the repression of her mouth and chin. A more
genial climate had quickened the circulation that North Liberty had
arrested, and suffused the transparent beauty of her skin with eloquent
life. It seemed as if the long, protracted northern spring of her youth
had suddenly burst into a summer of womanhood under those gentle skies;
and yet enough of her puritan precision of manner, movement, and gesture
remained to temper her fuller and more exuberant life and give it
repose. In a community of pretty women more or less given to the license
and extravagance of the epoch, she always looked like a lady.

He took her in his arms and half-lifted her up the last step of the
veranda. She resisted slightly with her characteristic action of
catching his wrists in both her hands and holding him off with an
awkward primness, and almost in the same tone that she had used to
Edward Blandford five years before, said:

"There, Dick, that will do."

CHAPTER II

Demorest's dream of a few days' conjugal seclusion and confidences with
his wife was quickly dispelled by that lady. "I came down with Rosita
Pico, whose father, you know, once owned this property," she said.
"She's gone on to her cousins at Los Osos Rancho to-night, but comes
here to-morrow for a visit. She knows the place well; in fact, she once
had a romantic love affair here. But she is very entertaining. It will
be a little change for us," she added, naively.

Demorest kept back a sigh, without changing his gentle smile. "I'm glad
for your sake, dear. But is she not a little flighty and inclined to
flirt a good deal? I think I've heard so."

"She's a young girl who has been severely tried, Richard, and perhaps is
not to blame for endeavoring to forget it in such distraction as she can
find," said Mrs. Demorest, with a slight return of her old ma