And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and

again at the bars. Young and beautiful and clever, how had life

tricked her into this deadlock, where had been the fault, and

whose?

For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past. She

did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded

eyes and closed doors before her mental vision. But to-night she

found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts

went back to the memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood? Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of

bitterness drew down her mouth. What a discontented, eager,

restless girlhood it had been, after all. A girlhood eternally

analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying. How she had secretly

despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing,

flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town. How

she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and

prosperous, her aunts' husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins! And,

for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard

for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little

woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine

admiration. She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax

well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but

she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally

gifted as he believed himself to be. Her uncles were simply

country merchants, her mother's fat, cheerful father dealt in

furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an

Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of

Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in

Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger,

in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason

why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no

questions asked. His speech was almost a different tongue from

theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead

of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and "hired girl," and

he seemed eternally bored and ungracious. This was enough for the

Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.

The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and

lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant

idleness. He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out

of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes

carelessly behind him. He had not been long in town before people

began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess

Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding

the rumor he had answered carelessly: "Something of that sort."




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