and golden. The great room, surrounded with boxes draped
with the colors of Spain and filled with women splendidly dressed and
jewelled, was very gay and inspiring, and the masques flung confetti and
had a squib for everybody with a salient characteristic. When the march
finished, Isabel, who wore a half-mask of black satin, and her hair in
two long braids plaited with gold tinsel, danced a Spanish dance by
herself, alternating tambourine and castanets. She had practised it
during the past week with a professional, and she gave it with all the
graceful sexless abandon of those California girls, who, a hundred years
before that night, were dancing out at the Presidio and Mission. She was
the success of the evening as she had purposed to be, and went home with
two proposals to her credit, and as gratified a vanity as ever
titillated the nerves of an ambitious and heartless young flirt. It was
not the first time that Isabel had deliberately elected to play a role
and achieved so signal a triumph that she was beset with the doubt if
she had not but just discovered herself. As she fell asleep in the dawn
of Lent it was with the somewhat cynical reflection that perhaps she
could make quite as great a success of the role of the statesman's wife
were she to essay it.

The roads were still in too muddy and broken a condition for the
long-projected automobile trip, and the Trennahans had decided to hire a
special car and journey to Mexico, spending some time in Southern
California. They urged Isabel to go with them, but she was sure that she
had had all the respite she needed, nor would she neglect her chickens
any longer. In truth she said good-bye to the party, which included not
only Lady Victoria, but several other congenial spirits, with a
considerable equanimity. She was suddenly tired of them all and glad to
go back to her solitudes.

Although she did not return with that exuberance of joy, which, upon
former occasions had made her feel like a long-prisoned nymph restored
to her native woodland, still she was more than content to be at home
again, and sat on her veranda until darkness closed the long evening.
Every trace of the winter's madness had vanished. The marsh was high and
red above the fallen waters, the hills were green, the trees budding,
wild flowers were beginning to show their heads. The scene, until the
last ray of twilight had gone, leaving that dark formlessness of a
California night with its horrid sugg