II

Talbot was obliged to go to San Francisco a day or two later, and when he returned the Senora was in bed with a severe cold.  He sent her a box of books and papers, and another of chocolates, and then forgot her in the excitement of the elections.  It was the autumn of the year 1868, and he was an enthusiastic admirer of Grant.  He stumped the State for that admirable warrior and indifferent statesman, with the result that his own following increased; and his interest in politics waxed with each of several notable successes in behalf of the candidate.  He finally announced decisively that he should run for Congress at the next elections, and a member of the House of Representatives from his district dying two days later, he was appointed at once to fill the vacant chair.

The Senora was still in bed with a persistent cold and cough when he left for Washington late in November, but he rode over to leave a good-bye with old Marcia, and ordered a bookseller in San Francisco to send her all the illustrated papers and magazines.

She entered his mind but seldom during those interesting months in Washington.  Talbot became sure of his particular talent at last, and determined to remain in politics for the rest of his life.  Moreover, the excitement until the 4th of March was intense, for Southern blood was still hot and bitter, and there were rumors in the air that Grant would be assassinated on the day of his inauguration.  He was not, however, and Talbot was glad to be in Washington on that memorable day.  He wrote the Senora an account both of the military appearance of the city and of the brilliant scene in the Senate Chamber, but she had ceased, for the time, to be a weekly necessity in his life.

And being a bachelor, wealthy, handsome, and properly launched, he was soon skimming that social sea of many crafts.  For the first time since his abrupt severance from the Los Olivos festivities he enjoyed society.  San Francisco’s had seemed a poor imitation of what novels described, but Washington was full of brilliant interest.  And he met more than one woman who recalled his boyish ideals, women who were far more like the vision in the English church-yard than Delfina Carillo; who, indeed, had not resembled the English girl in anything but manifest of race, and had been an ideal apart, never to be encountered again in this world.

It was a long and exciting session, and he gave all the energies of his mind to the great question of reconstruction, but more than once he asked himself if the time had not come to marry, if it were not a duty to his old self to gratify the ambition to which he owed the foundations of his success with life.  A beautiful and high-bred wife would still afford him profound satisfaction, no doubt of that.  He could in the last ten or twelve years have married more than one charming San Francisco girl, but that interval of passionate love between his youthful ambition