t what?"

"Wa'al, wot with her enjyments of the vanities of this life and
the kempany she keeps, I reckon she's in no hurry," said Ezekiel,
cheerfully.

The entrance of Manuel here cut short any response from Demorest,
who after a few directions in Spanish to the peon, left his guest to
himself.

He walked to the veranda with the same dull preoccupation that Ezekiel
had noticed as so different from his old decisive manner, and remained
for a few moments abstractedly gazing into the dark garden. The strange
and mystic shapes which had impressed even the practical Ezekiel, had
become even more weird and ghost-like in the faint radiance of a rising
moon.

What memories evoked by his rude guest seemed to take form and outline
in that dreamy and unreal expanse!

He saw his wife again, standing as she had stood that night in her
mother's house, with the white muffler around her head, and white face,
imploring him to fly; he saw himself again hurrying through the driving
storm to Warensboro, and reaching the train that bore him swiftly and
safely miles away--that same night when her husband was perishing in the
swollen river. He remembered with what strangely mingled sensations he
had read the account of Blandford's death in the newspapers, and how the
loss of his old friend was forgotten in the associations conjured up by
his singular meeting that very night with the mysterious woman he had
loved. He remembered that he had never dreamed how near and fateful
were these associations; and how he had kept his promise not to seek
her without her permission, until six months after, when she appointed
a meeting, and revealed to him the whole truth. He could see her now,
as he had seen her then, more beautiful and fascinating than ever in her
black dress, and the pensive grace of refined suffering and restrained
passion in her delicate face. He remembered, too, how the shock of
her disclosure--the knowledge that she had been his old friend's
wife--seemed only to accent her purity and suffering and his own wilful
recklessness, and how it had stirred all the chivalry, generosity, and
affection of his easy nature to take the whole responsibility of this
innocent but compromising intrigue on his own shoulders. He had had no
self-accusing sense of disloyalty to Blandford in his practical nature;
he had never suspected the shy, proper girl of being his wife; he was
willing to believe now, that had he known it, even that night, he wou