He did not see how nervous and angry Petralto was under his easy, boastful conversation.  He did not notice the ashy face, the blazing eyes, the set lips, the trembling hands, of the passionate Spanish nature, until Petralto blazed out in a torrent of unreasonable words and taunts, and ordered Lennox out of his presence.

Even then the stupid, good-natured, purse-proud man could not see his danger.  He began to apologize to me for Petralto’s rudeness, and excuse “anything in a fellow whom he had cut out so badly.”

“Liar!” Petralto retorted.  “She loved me first; you can never have her whole heart.  Begone!  If I had you on the Guadalupe, where Jessy and I lived and loved, I would—­”

The sentence was not finished.  Lennox struck Petralto to the ground, and before I raised him, I persuaded the angry bridegroom to retire.  I stayed with Petralto that night, although I was not altogether pleased with him.  He was sulky and silent at first, but after a quiet rest and a few consoling Havanas he was willing to talk the affair over.

“Lennox tortured me,” he said, passionately.  “How could he be so unfeeling, so mad, as to suppose I should care to learn what chain of circumstances led him to find out my love and then steal her?  Everything he said tortured me but one fact—­Jessy was alone and thoroughly miserable.  Poor little pet!  She thought I had forgotten her, and so she married him—­not for love; I won’t believe it.”

“But,” I said, “Petralto, you have no right to hug such a delusion; and seeing that you had made no attempt to follow Jessy and marry her, she had every right to suppose you really had forgotten her.  Besides, I think it very likely that she should love a young, rich, good-looking fellow like Will Lennox.”

“In not pursuing her I was following Jessy’s own request and obeying my own plighted promise.  It was understood between us that I should wait patiently until Jessy was twenty-one.  Even Scotch customs would then have regarded her as her own mistress and acknowledged her right to marry as she desired; and if I did not write, she has not wanted constant tokens of my remembrance.  I have trusted her,” he said, mournfully, “without a sign from her.”

That winter the beauty of Mrs. Lennox and the devotion of her husband were on every tongue.  But married is not mated, and the best part of Jessy Lorimer’s beauty had never touched Will Lennox.  Her pure, simple, poetic temperament he had never understood, and he felt in a dim, uncertain way that the noblest part of his wife escaped him.

He could not enter into her feelings, and her spiritual superiority unconsciously irritated him.  Jessy had set her love’s first music to the broad, artistic heart of Petralto; she could not, without wronging herself, decline to a lower range of feelings and a narrower heart.  This reserve of herself was not a conscious one.  She was not one of those self-involved women always studying their own emotions; she was simply true to the light within her.  But her way was not Will Lennox’s way, her finer fancies and lighter thoughts were mysteries to his grosser nature.