would still
afford him profound satisfaction, no doubt of that. He could in the last
ten or twelve years have married more than one charming San Francisco
girl, but that interval of passionate love between his youthful ambition
and his many opportunities had given him a distaste for a lukewarm
marriage. Here in Washington, however, California seemed a long way off,
and he was only forty, in the very perfection of mental and physical
vigor. Could he not love again? Surely a man in the long allotted span
must begin life more than once. He found himself, after an hour, in some
beautiful woman's boudoir, or with a charming girl in the pale
illumination of a conservatory, longing for the old tremors of hope and
despair, and he determined to let himself go at the first symptom. But
he continued to be merely charmed and interested. If the turbulent
waters were in him still, they had fallen far below their banks and
would not rise at his bidding.

It was not to be expected that the Senora would write; she hated the
sight of a pen, and only wrote once a month--with sighs of protest that
were almost energetic--to her daughters. Padre Ortega was too old for
correspondence; consequently Talbot heard no news of Santa Ursula except
from his major-domo, who wrote a monthly report of the progress of the
olive-trees and the hotel. This person was not given to gossip, and
Talbot was in ignorance of the health of his old friend, in spite of one
or two letters of inquiry, until almost the end of the session. Then the
major-domo was moved to write the following postscript to one of his dry
reports:--

The Senora is dying, I guess--consumption, the galloping kind.
You may see her again, and you main't. We're all sorry here,
for she's always bin square and kind.

There still remained three weeks of the session, but Talbot's committee
had finished its work, and he was practically free. He paired with a
friendly Democrat, and started for California the day he received the
letter. The impulse to go to the bedside of his old friend had been
immediate and peremptory. He forgot the pleasant women in Washington,
his new-formed plans. The train seemed to walk.

They were not sentimental memories that moved so persistently in his
mind during that long hot journey overland. Had they risen they would
have been rebuked, as having no place in the sad reality of to-day. An
old friend was dying, the most necessary and sympathetic he had k