In fact, he had been possessed by another luminous idea—­a wild idea that to him seemed almost as absurd as the one which had brought him all this trouble.  It had come to him like that one—­out of a starlit night—­and he had risen one morning with a feverish intent to put it into action!  It brought him later to take an unprecedented walk alone with Miss Pottinger, to linger under green leaves in unfrequented woods, and at last seemed about to desert him as he stood in a little hollow with her hand in his—­their only listener an inquisitive squirrel.  Yet this was all the disappointed animal heard him stammer,—­

“So you see, dear, it would then be no lie—­for—­don’t you see?—­she’d be really my mother as well as yours.”

The marriage of Prosper Riggs and Miss Pottinger was quietly celebrated at Sacramento, but Prossy’s “old mother” did not return with the happy pair.

Of Mrs. Pottinger’s later career some idea may be gathered from a letter which Prosper received a year after his marriage.  “Circumstances,” wrote Mrs. Pottinger, “which had induced me to accept the offer of a widower to take care of his motherless household, have since developed into a more enduring matrimonial position, so that I can always offer my dear Prosper a home with his mother, should he choose to visit this locality, and a second father in Hiram W. Watergates, Esq., her husband.”

THE CONVALESCENCE OF JACK HAMLIN

The habitually quiet, ascetic face of Seth Rivers was somewhat disturbed and his brows were knitted as he climbed the long ascent of Windy Hill to its summit and his own rancho.  Perhaps it was the effect of the characteristic wind, which that afternoon seemed to assault him from all points at once and did not cease its battery even at his front door, but hustled him into the passage, blew him into the sitting room, and then celebrated its own exit from the long, rambling house by the banging of doors throughout the halls and the slamming of windows in the remote distance.

Mrs. Rivers looked up from her work at this abrupt onset of her husband, but without changing her own expression of slightly fatigued self-righteousness.  Accustomed to these elemental eruptions, she laid her hands from force of habit upon the lifting tablecloth, and then rose submissively to brush together the scattered embers and ashes from the large hearthstone, as she had often done before.

“You’re in early, Seth,” she said.

“Yes.  I stopped at the Cross Roads Post Office.  Lucky I did, or you’d hev had kempany on your hands afore you knowed it—­this very night!  I found this letter from Dr. Duchesne,” and he produced a letter from his pocket.

Mrs. Rivers looked up with an expression of worldly interest.  Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type.  The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond Windy Hill.