were
married by a Texan justice of the peace, and, after a brief honeymoon
across the Mexican line--a honeymoon of mingled bliss and battle--found
the old people relentless and themselves squabbling and stranded. The
elders swooped upon the girl-wife, bore her back to Texas and sent the
strolling player to South America, with the promise never to return or
bother them. They told her, and she refused to believe, that he speedily
met his death at the hands of a jealous husband in Valparaiso. They
later told her, and she fully believed, that, in defiance of his promise
and in desire for her, he had determined to reclaim her as they were
going to San Francisco, and was washed overboard from the _Colima_ by a
tidal wave. Inez, like a certain few of her sex, could believe anything
possible for love--of her, and Stanley Foster went far toward confirming
her views for as much as the month that followed their mad flight. Then,
with his commission gone--and his illusions--he found himself bound to a
woman whose fast-fading charms were no compensation for anything he had
lost. Much of their misery, and her own, was told in metropolitan
circles by Felicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs.
Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or _bonne_.
Felicie had gone thither in hopes of extracting something from Foster's
people, as nothing could be gotten from the Farrells since nothing short
of extradition proceedings could induce their return to the States. It
was the same miserable old story, and Sandy Ray many a time thanked
Heaven, and Stone, and the senior surgeon, for the order that took him
to the agency and away from Inez Dwight. Would he have succumbed had he
stayed? Older and presumably wiser men have done worse, so why not
Sandy? Perhaps mother and Priscilla were not all wrong in their
forebodings.

But what a scene of love and repentance and rejoicing was that when
those two women, Aunt Marion and her niece, compared notes over the
episode of that night's vigil and Sandy's part therein. Then his story
of his coming was true, after all! Priscilla had seen him entering the
front gate; had heard him at the door; had heard him pass round to the
side of the house. Blenke it was who, counterfeiting even the painful
little limp that still hampered Sandy's movements, had caused so many to
believe it was Billy Ray's firstborn, in the dead of night, invading the
quarters of a brother-officer, to the scan