ng of the moon. Again she heard her name called,
and this time in accents so strangely familiar that with a slight cry
she ran into the corridor, crossed the patio, and reached the open gate.
The darkness that had, even in this brief interval, again fallen upon
the prospect she tried in vain to pierce with eye and voice. A blank
silence followed. Then the veil was suddenly withdrawn; the vast plain,
stretching from the mountain to the sea, shone as clearly as in the
light of day; the moving current of the channel glittered like black
pearls, the stagnant pools like molten lead; but not a sign of life nor
motion broke the monotony of the broad expanse. She must have surely
dreamed it. A chill wind drove her back to the house again; she entered
her bedroom, and in half an hour she was in a peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER V

The two men kept their secret. Mr. Poindexter convinced Mrs. Tucker that
the sale of Los Cuervos could not be effected until the notoriety of her
husband's flight had been fairly forgotten, and she was forced to accept
her fate. The sale of her diamonds, which seemed to her to have realized
a singularly extravagant sum, enabled her to quietly reinstate the
Pattersons in the tienda and to discharge in full her husband's
liabilities to the rancheros and his humbler retainers.

Meanwhile the winter rains had ceased. It seemed to her as if the clouds
had suddenly one night struck their white tents and stolen away, leaving
the unvanquished sun to mount the vacant sky the next morning alone,
and possess it thenceforward unchallenged. One afternoon she thought
the long sad waste before her window had caught some tint of gayer
color from the sunset; a week later she found it a blazing landscape of
poppies, broken here and there by blue lagoons of lupine, by pools of
daisies, by banks of dog-roses, by broad outlying shores of dandelions
that scattered their lavish gold to the foot of the hills, where the
green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the darker crest
of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She
had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian
Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like
prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath
her feet; the few circuits of a plough around the outlying corral were
enough to call out a jungle growth of giant grain that almost hid the
low walls of the hacienda. In