quarters, but--you see I am
neither married nor unmarried."

"No!" Paul agreed with ponderous respectability. "It would never do.
Besides, I've hired a house of the Jefe-Politico; the one that crowns
the Promontory. When the rain slacks we'll move out to the mine."

"There is one thing I should like," he added as he rose to go. "If you
would have a stone put over the child's grave--something nice--you're a
better judge than me,--I'll----"

"Too late," the artist interrupted. "Andrea broke up her necklace; put
savings of eighteen generations into the finest tomb in the cemetery."
He looked curiously at Paul, but his was that small order of mind which
persistently fixes responsibility for the most inevitable calamity upon
some person. To the day of his death he would go on taxing the child's
death against Andrea; he did not even comment on this last proof of her
devoted love.

After he was gone, Bachelder returned to his window, just in time to see
the bridge go. A thin stream in summer, meandering aimlessly between
wide banks, the river now ran a full half-mile wide, splitting the town
with its yeasty race. An annual occurrence, this was a matter of small
moment to the severed halves. Each would pursue the even tenor of its
way till the slack of the rains permitted communication by canoe and the
rebuilding of the bridge. But it had special significance now in that
Andrea lived on the other bank.

He wondered if the news of Paul's return had crossed, muttering: "Poor
girl, poor girl!" Adding, a moment later: "But happier than the other.
Poor little Desdemona!"

* * * * *

How melancholy is the voice of a flood! Its resurgent dirge will move a
new-born babe to frightened wailing, and stirs in strong men a vague
uneasiness that roots in the vast and calamitous experience of the race.
Call of hungry waters, patter of driving rain, sough of the weird wind,
it requires good company and a red-coal fire to offset their moanings of
eternity. Yet though the fireless tropics could not supply one, and she
lacked the other, the storm voices were hardly responsible for Ethel
Steiner's sadness the third morning after her arrival.

Neither was it due to the fact that Paul had failed to come in the
preceding night from the mine. Seeming relieved rather than distressed,
she had gone quietly to bed. No, it was neither the storm, his absence,
nor any of the small miseries that afflict young wives. Poo