had been playmates, and their parents had considered the union a consummation of their own lifelong friendship.  Upon her mother’s death, Alaire had been sent abroad, and there she remained while “Young Ed” attended an Eastern college.  For any child the experience would have been a lonesome one, and through it the motherless Texas girl had grown into an imaginative, sentimental person, living in a make-believe world, peopled, for the most part, with the best-remembered figures of romance and fiction.  There were, of course, some few flesh-and-blood heroes among the rest, and of these the finest and the noblest had been “Young Ed” Austin.

When she came home to marry, Alaire was still very much of a child, and she still considered Ed her knight.  As for him, he was captivated by this splendid, handsome girl, whom he remembered only as a shy, red-headed little comrade.

Never was a marriage more propitious, never were two young people more happily situated than these two, for they were madly in love, and each had ample means with which to make the most of life.

As Las Palmas had been the elder Austin’s wedding-gift to his son, so Alaire’s dowry from her father had been La Feria, a grant of lands across the Rio Grande beyond the twenty-league belt by which Mexico fatuously strives to guard her border.  And to Las Palmas had come the bride and groom to live, to love, and to rear their children.

But rarely has there been a shorter honeymoon, seldom a swifter awakening.  Within six months “Young Ed” had killed his wife’s love and had himself become an alcoholic.  Others of his father’s vices revived, and so multiplied that what few virtues the young man had inherited were soon choked.  The change was utterly unforeseen; its cause was rooted too deeply in the past to be remedied.  Maturity had marked an epoch with “Young Ed”; marriage had been the mile-post where his whole course veered abruptly.

To the bride the truth had come as a stunning tragedy.  She was desperately frightened, too, and lived a nightmare life, the while she tried in every way to check the progress of that disintegration which was eating up her happiness.  The wreck of her hopes and glad imaginings left her sick, bewildered, in the face of “the thing that couldn’t.”

Nor had the effect of this transformation in “Young Ed” been any less painful to his father.  For a time the old man refused to credit it, but finally, when the truth was borne in upon him unmistakably, and he saw that Las Palmas was in a fair way to being ruined through the boy’s mismanagement, the old cattleman had risen in his wrath.  The ranch had been his pride as Ed had been his joy; to see them both go wrong was more than he could bear.  There had been a terrible scene, and a tongue-lashing delivered in the language of early border days.  There had followed other visits from Austin, senior, other and even bitterer quarrels; at last, when the girl-wife remained firm in her refusal to divorce her husband, the understanding had been reached by which the management of Las Palmas was placed absolutely in her hands.