“You mean,” said Tisdale slowly, “you heard about Mrs. Barbour.”

She bowed affirmatively.  The color swept in a wave to her face; her lashes fell.

“Mrs. Feversham heard about it, how David had brought her down from the interior.  I saw the cabin he had furnished for her, and she herself, sewing at the window.  Her face was beautiful.”

There was a silence, then Hollis said:  “So you came back on the Aquila to Seattle.  But you wrote; you explained about the child?”

She shook her head.  “I waited to hear from David first.  I did not know, then, that the letter with Silva’s picture was lost.”

Tisdale squared his shoulders, looking off again to the snow-peaks above Cerberus.

“Consider!” She rose with an outward movement of her hands, like one groping in the dark for a closed door.  “It was a terrible mistake, but I did not know David as you knew him.  My father, who was dying, arranged our marriage.  I was very young and practically without money in a big city; there was not another relative in the world who cared what became of me.  And, in any case, even had I known the meaning of love and marriage, in that hour,—­when I was losing him,—­I must have agreed to anything he asked.  We had been everything to each other; everything.  But I’ve been a proud woman; sensitive to slight.  It was in the blood—­both sides.  And I had been taught early to cover my feelings.  My father had adored my mother; he used to remind me she was patrician to the finger-tips, and that I should not wear my heart on my sleeve if I wished to be like her.  And, when I visited my grandfather, Don Silva, in the south, he would say:  ’Beatriz, remember the blood of generations of soldiers is bottled in you; carry yourself like the last Gonzales, with some fortitude.’  So—­at Seward—­I remembered.”

Her voice, while she said this, almost failed, but every word reached Tisdale.  He felt, without seeing, the something that was appeal yet not appeal, that keyed her whole body and shone like a changing light and shade in her face.  “I told myself I would not be sacrificed, effaced,” she went on.  “It was my individuality against Fate.  Since little Silva was dead, my life was my own to shape as I might.  I did not hear from David for a long time; he wrote less and less frequently, more briefly every year.  He never spoke of the baby, and I believed he must have heard through some friend in California of Silva’s death.  Nothing was left to tell.  He never spoke of his home-coming, and I did not; I dreaded it too much.  Whenever the last steamers of the season were due, I nerved myself to look the passenger lists over; and when his name was missing, it was a reprieve.  Neither my father nor my grandfather had believed in divorce; in their eyes it was disgrace.  It seemed right, for Silva’s sake, out of the rich placers David continued to find, he should contribute to my support.  So—­I lived my life—­the best I was able.  I had many interests, and always one morning of each week I spent among the children at the hospital where I had endowed the Silva Weatherbee bed.”