ld
never have seen her again; he had been very foolish; he had made this
poor woman participate in his folly; but he had never been dishonest or
treacherous in thought or action. If Blandford had lived, even he
would have admitted it. Yet he was guiltily conscious of a material
satisfaction in Blandford's death, without his wife's religious
conviction of the saving graces of predestination.

They had been married quietly when the two years of her widowhood
had expired; his former relations with her husband and the straitened
circumstances in which Blandford's death had left her having been deemed
sufficient excuse in the eyes of North Liberty for her more worldly
union. They had come to California at her suggestion "to begin life
anew," for she had not hesitated to make this dislocation of all her
antecedent surroundings as a reason as well as a condition of this
marriage. She wished to see the world of which he had been a passing
glimpse; to expand under his protection beyond the limits of her
fettered youth. He had bought this old Spanish estate, with its near
vineyard and its outlying leagues covered with wild cattle, partly from
that strange contradictory predilection for peaceful husbandry common to
men who have led a roving life, and partly as a check to her growing and
feverish desire for change and excitement. He had at first enjoyed with
an almost parental affection her childish unsophisticated delight in
that world he had already wearied of, and which he had been prepared
to gladly resign for her. But as the months and even years had passed
without any apparent diminution in her zest for these pleasures, he
tried uneasily to resume his old interest in them, and spent ten months
with her in the chaotic freedom of San Francisco hotel life. But to his
discomfiture he found that they no longer diverted him; to his horror he
discovered that those easy gallantries in which he had spent his youth,
and in which he had seen no harm, were intolerable when exhibited to his
wife, and he trembled between inquietude and indignation at the copies
of his former self, whom he met in hotel parlors, at theatres, and
in public conveyances. The next time she visited some friends in San
Francisco he did not accompany her. Though he fondly cherished his
experience of her power to resist even stronger temptation, he was too
practical to subject himself to the annoyance of witnessing it. In her
absence he trusted her completely; his s