Perhaps his happiness was just a little increased when Mrs. Stanley announced her intention of returning to New York.  The lady had been amiable on the whole, as she meant always to be; but she could not help daily taking up her parable concerning the tyranny and stupidity of man and the superior virtue of woman; and sometimes she felt it her duty to put it to Thurstane that he owed everything to his wife; all of which was more or less wearing, even to her niece.  At the same time she was such a disinterested, well-intentioned creature that it was impossible not to grant her a certain amount of admiration.  For instance, when Clara proposed to make her comfortable for life by settling upon her fifty thousand dollars, she replied peremptorily that it was far too much for an old woman who had decided to turn her back on the frivolities of society, and she could with difficulty be brought to accept twenty thousand.

Furthermore, she was capable, that is, in certain favored moments, of confessing error.  “My dear,” she said to Clara, some weeks after the marriage, “I have made one great mistake since I came to these countries.  I believed that Mr. Coronado was the right man and Mr. Thurstane the wrong one.  Oh, that smooth-tongued, shiny-eyed, meeching, bowing, complimenting hypocrite!  I see at last what a villain he was. I see it,” she emphasized, as if nobody else had discovered it.  “To think that a person who was so right on the main question [female suffrage] could be so wrong on everything else!  The contradiction adds to his guilt.  Well, I have had my lesson.  Every one must make her mistake.  I shall never be so humbugged again.”

Some little time after Thurstane had received the acceptance of his resignation and established himself in his handsome city house, Aunt Maria observed abruptly, “My dears, I must go back.”

“Go back where?  To the desert and turn hermit?” asked Clara, who was accustomed to joke her relative about “spheres and missions.”

“To New York,” replied Mrs. Stanley.  “I can accomplish nothing here.  This miserable Legislature will take no notice of my petitions for female suffrage.”

“Oh, that is because you sign them alone,” laughed the younger lady.

“I can’t get anybody else to sign them,” said Aunt Maria with some asperity.  “And what if I do sign them alone?  A house full of men ought to have gallantry enough to grant one lady’s request.  California is not ripe for any great and noble measure.  I can’t remain where I find so little sympathy and collaboration.  I must go where I can be of use.  It is my duty.”

And go she did.  But before she shook off her dust against the Pacific coast there was an interview with an old acquaintance.

It must be understood that the fatigues and sufferings of that terrible pilgrimage through the desert had bothered the constitution of little Sweeny, and that, after lying in garrison hospital at San Francisco for several months, he had been discharged from the service on “certificate of physical disability.”  Thurstane, who had kept track of him, immediately took him to his house, first as an invalid hanger-on, and then as a jack of all work.