elivered from the
frivolous and commonplace temptations of other women, she should devote
herself to the improvement and instruction not only of the Indians but
of the youth of her own class. The schools founded by the estimable
and enterprising Borica had practically disappeared, and she was by far
the best educated woman in California. For such there was a manifest
and an inexorable duty. She would live to be old, she supposed, like
all the Arguellos and Moragas; but hidden in her unspotted soul would
be the flame of eternal youth, fed by an ideal and a memory that would
outlive her weary, insignificant body. And in it she would find her
courage and her inspiration, as well as an unwasting sympathy for those
she taught.

Then had come the sudden and passionate wooing of Rezanov. All other
ideals and aspirations had fled. She had alternated between the tragic
extremes of bliss and despair. So completely did the ardor of her
nature respond to his, so fierce and primitive was the cry of her ego
for its mate, that she cared nothing for the distress of her parents
nor the fate of California. There is no love complete without this
early and absolute selfishness, which is merely the furious
determination of the race to accomplish its object before the spirit
awakens and the passions cool.

Last night life had seemed serious; she had been girlishly,
romantically happy. It is true that her heart had thumped against the
wall as he kissed her, and that she had been full of a wild desire to
sing, although she could hardly shape and utter the words that danced
in her throbbing brain. But she had been conscious through it all of
the romantic circumstance, of the lonely beauty of the night, of the
delightful wickedness of meeting her lover in the silence and the dark,
even with a wall ten feet high between them. For the wall, indeed, she
had been confusedly and deliciously grateful.

And this was what a man's love came to: ardors by night and expedience
by day! Or was it merely that Rezanov was the man of affairs always,
the lover incidentally? But how could a man who had seemed the very
epitome of all the lovers of all the world but a few hours before,
contemplate, far less permit, a separation of years? Poor Concha
groped toward the great unacceptable fact of life the whole, lit by
love its chief incident; and had a fleeting vision of the waste lands
in the lives of women occupied only with matrimony. But she dro