Belding’s unhappiness could hardly be laid to material loss.  He had been rich and was now poor, but change of fortune such as that could not have made him unhappy.  Something more somber and mysterious and sad than the loss of Dick Gale and their friends had come into the lives of his wife and Nell.  He dated the time of this change back to a certain day when Mrs. Belding recognized in the elder Chase an old schoolmate and a rejected suitor.  It took time for slow-thinking Belding to discover anything wrong in his household, especially as the fact of the Gales lingering there made Mrs. Belding and Nell, for the most part, hide their real and deeper feelings.  Gradually, however, Belding had forced on him the fact of some secret cause for grief other than Gale’s loss.  He was sure of it when his wife signified her desire to make a visit to her old home back in Peoria.  She did not give many reasons, but she did show him a letter that had found its way from old friends.  This letter contained news that may or may not have been authentic; but it was enough, Belding thought, to interest his wife.  An old prospector had returned to Peoria, and he had told relatives of meeting Robert Burton at the Sonoyta Oasis fifteen years before, and that Burton had gone into the desert never to return.  To Belding this was no surprise, for he had heard that before his marriage.  There appeared to have been no doubts as to the death of his wife’s first husband.  The singular thing was that both Nell’s father and grandfather had been lost somewhere in the Sonora Desert.

Belding did not oppose his wife’s desire to visit her old home.  He thought it would be a wholesome trip for her, and did all in his power to persuade Nell to accompany her.  But Nell would not go.

It was after Mrs. Belding’s departure that Belding discovered in Nell a condition of mind that amazed and distressed him.  She had suddenly become strangely wretched, so that she could not conceal it from even the Gales, who, of all people, Belding imagined, were the ones to make Nell proud.  She would tell him nothing.  But after a while, when he had thought it out, he dated this further and more deplorable change in Nell back to a day on which he had met Nell with Radford Chase.  This indefatigable wooer had not in the least abandoned his suit.  Something about the fellow made Belding grind his teeth.  But Nell grew not only solicitously, but now strangely, entreatingly earnest in her importunities to Belding not to insult or lay a hand on Chase.  This had bound Belding so far; it had made him think and watch.  He had never been a man to interfere with his women folk.  They could do as they liked, and usually that pleased him.  But a slow surprise gathered and grew upon him when he saw that Nell, apparently, was accepting young Chase’s attentions.  At least, she no longer hid from him.  Belding could not account for this, because he was sure Nell cordially despised the fellow.  And toward the end he divined, if he did not actually know, that these Chases possessed some strange power over Nell, and were using it.  That stirred a hate in Belding—­a hate he had felt at the very first and had manfully striven against, and which now gave him over to dark brooding thoughts.