She had never been a thoughtful woman, her days for many years had run brilliantly on the surface of life, she knew not whence the current was flowing, nor why, nor where it led her; she did not naturally analyze, nor dispute events.  Only a few years ago she would have said that to an extraordinary degree fortune had been kind to her.  She had been born with an adventurous spirit, she had played her game well and boldly, and, according to all the standards of her type, she had won.  But sitting before this quiet fire, perhaps it occurred to her to wonder how it happened that there were no more hazards, no more cards left to play.  She was caught in a net of circumstances too tight for her unravelling.  Truly it might be cut, but when she stood in the loose wreckage of it—­how should she use her freedom?  If it was a cage, at least it was a comfortable cage; at least it was better than the howling darkness of the unfamiliar desert beyond.

And yet she raged, and her hurt spirit flung itself again and again at the bars.  Young and beautiful and clever, how had life tricked her into this deadlock, where had been the fault, and whose?

For some undefined reason Rachael rarely thought of the past.  She did not care to bring its certainties, its panorama of blinded eyes and closed doors before her mental vision.  But to-night she found herself walking again in those old avenues; her thoughts went back to the memories of her girlhood.

Girlhood?  Her eyes smiled, but with the smile a little twinge of bitterness drew down her mouth.  What a discontented, eager, restless girlhood it had been, after all.  A girlhood eternally analyzing, comparing, resenting, envying.  How she had secretly despised the other girls, typical of their class, the laughing, flirting, dress-possessed girls of a small California town.  How she had despised her aunts, all comfortably married and prosperous, her aunts’ husbands, her stodgy, noisy cousins!  And, for that matter, there had never been much reverence in her regard for her mother, although Rachael loved that complaining little woman in her cool way.

But for her father, the tall, clever, unhappy girl had a genuine admiration.  She did not love him, no one who knew Gerald Fairfax well could possibly have sustained a deep affection for him, but she believed him to be almost as remarkably educated and naturally gifted as he believed himself to be.  Her uncles were simply country merchants, her mother’s fat, cheerful father dealt in furniture, and, incidentally, coffins, but her father was an Englishman, and naturally held himself above the ordinary folk of Los Lobos.

Nobody knew much about him, when he first made his appearance in Los Lobos, this silky-haired, round-faced, supercilious stranger, in his smart, shabby Norfolk coat, which was perhaps one reason why every girl in the village was at once willing to marry him, no questions asked.  His speech was almost a different tongue from theirs; he was thirty-five, he had dogs and a man-servant, instead of the usual equipment of mother, sisters, and “hired girl,” and he seemed eternally bored and ungracious.  This was enough for the Los Lobos girls, and for most of their mothers, too.