of the Rotscheff household. A Californian by birth,
he was, nevertheless, a man of modern civilization, travelled, a
student, and a keen lover of masculine sports. Although the most
powerful man in the politics of his conservative country, he was an
American in appearance and dress. His cloth or tweed suggested the
colorous magnificence of the caballeros as little as did his thin
nervous figure and grim pallid intellectual face. Rotscheff liked him
better than any man he had ever met; with the Princess he usually waged
war, that lady being clever, quick, and wedded to her own opinions.
For Natalie he felt a sincere friendship at once. Being a man of keen
sympathies and strong impulses, he divined her trouble before he heard
her story, and desired to help her.

The Countess Natalie, despite the Governor's prohibition, was addicted
to roving over the cliffs by herself, finding kinship in the sterile
crags and futile restlessness of the ocean. She had learned that
although change of scene lightened the burden, only death would release
her from herself.

"She will get over it," said the Princess Helene to Estenega. "I was in
love twice before I met Alex, so I know. Natalie is so beautiful that
some day some man, who will not look in the least like poor Alexis, will
make her forget."

Estenega, being a man of the world and having consequently outgrown the
cynicism of youth, also knowing women better than this fair Minerva
would know them in twenty lifetimes, thought differently, and a battle
ensued.

Natalie, meanwhile, wandered along the cliffs. She passed the town
hurriedly. Several times when in its vicinity before, the magnetism of
an intense gaze had given her a thrill of alarm, and once or twice she
had met face to face the miller's son--a forbidding youth with the
skull of the Tartar and the coarse black hair and furtive eyes of the
Indian--whose admiration of her beauty had been annoyingly apparent. She
was not conscious of observation to-day, however, and skirted the cliffs
rapidly, drawing her gray mantle about her as the wind howled by, but
did not lift the hood; the massive coils of silver-blond hair kept her
head warm.

As the Princess Helene, despite her own faultless blondinity, had
pronounced, Natalie Ivanhoff was a beautiful woman. Her profile had the
delicate effect produced by the chisel. Her white skin was transparent
and untinted, but the mouth was scarlet. The large long eyes of a
changeful blue