and she knew that
Trennahan was happy.

Meanwhile they escaped the others and rode together before breakfast,
read together after, explored every corner of the woods, and talked of
many of the things under heaven. Magdalena, except for an occasional
flutter of eyelid or leap of colour, confessed nothing: her pride was a
supple armour that she laced tightly above her heart; but Trennahan's
very self lifted the trap-door and looked to him through her eyes, and
he had no misgivings. Sometimes he awakened suddenly in the night and
gave a quick, short laugh: he was so new to himself. But he knew that he
had found something very like true happiness, and he was loving her very
deeply. At first he had been pricked by the apprehension that it could
not last; that nature had constructed him to move upon the lower planes;
that a prolonged tour on the heights would result in disastrous and
possibly hideous reaction: his time-worn habits of loving had been of
woof and make so different. But as time passed and the light in his
spirit spread until it dazzled his eyes and consumed his memories, as
the sense of regeneration grew stronger, as the future beckoned
alluringly, as he forgot to remember whether Magdalena were plain or
beautiful, as peace and content and happiness possessed him,--he ceased
to question his immutability. He had lived in the world for forty years,
and it was like an old bottle of scent long uncorked. The ideals of his
youth had not changed; they had gone. Beautiful women had turned to gall
on his tongue, shrunken to their skeletons in his weary eyes. Fate had
steered his bark in the open sea of bachelorhood until he was old enough
and wise enough to choose his mate with his soul and his brain, and Fate
had steered him to Magdalena. He was profoundly thankful.

Their intimacy attracted little attention in Menlo Park, for the reason
that it was confined within the wooded limits of Fair Oaks. When they
rode and drove with the others and attended dinners and dances, they
kept apart. As Rose had predicted, gaieties were sporadic, although the
young people met somewhere, usually at the Yorbas', every Saturday
evening; what others did during the long hot days when there was no
company to entertain, concerned no one. Occasionally one of Don
Roberto's huge farm waggons, as deep as a tall man's height, was filled
with hay, and young Menlo Park jolted slowly to the hills. They ate
their luncheon by cool streams dark with m