The newcomer bought a small ranch, three miles out of town, and lounged about it in a highly edifying condition of elegant idleness.  He rode a good horse, drank a great deal, and strode out of the post-office once a week scattering monogrammed envelopes carelessly behind him.  He had not been long in town before people began to say that his elder brother was a lord; a duke, Mrs. Chess Baxter, the postmistress said, because to her question regarding the rumor he had answered carelessly:  “Something of that sort.”

Thirty years ago there were a great many detached Englishmen in California, fourth and fifth sons, remittance men, family scapegraces who had been banished to the farthest frontier by relatives who regarded California as beyond the reach of gossip, and almost beyond the reach of letters.  Checks, small but regular, arrived quarterly for these gentry, who had only to drink, sleep, play cards, and demoralize the girls of the country.  Here and there among them, to be sure, were pink-skinned boys as fresh and sweet as the apple-blossoms under which they rode their horses, but for the most part the emigrants were dissipated, disenchanted, clinging loyally to the traditions of the older country that had discarded them, and scorning the fragrant and inexhaustible richness of the new land that had made them welcome.  They were, as a class, silent, only voluble on the subject of the despised country of their adoption, and absolutely non-committal as to their own histories.  But far from questioning their credentials, the women and girls everywhere accepted them eagerly, caught something of an English accent and something of an English arrogance.

So Clara Mumford, a rose of a girl, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, and innocent with the terrible innocence of the village girlhood that feels itself so wise—­Clara, who knew, because her two older sisters were married, where babies come from, and knew, because of Alta Porter’s experience, that girls—­nice girls, who went with one through the high school—­can yield to temptation and be ruined—­Clara only felt, in shyly announcing her engagement to Gerald Fairfax, that Fate had been too kind.

That this glittering stranger twice her age—­why, he was even a little bald—­a man who had travelled, who knew people of title, knew books, and manners, and languages—­that he should marry an undertaker’s daughter in Los Lobos!  It was unbelievable.  Clara’s only misgiving during her short engagement was that he would disappear like a dream.  She agreed with everything he said; even carrying her new allegiance to the point of laughing a little at her own people:  the layer cakes her mother made for the Sunday noonday dinner; the red-handed, freckled swain who called on her younger sister in the crisp, moonlighted winter evenings; and the fact that her father shaved in the kitchen.

A few weeks slipped by, and Clara duly confided her youth and her innocence and her roses to her English husband, a little ashamed of the wedding presents her friends sent her, even a little doubtful of her parents’ handsome gift of a bird’s-eye maple bedroom set and a parlor set in upholstered cherry.