A desolate woman, bereft of husband and home, and flying through storm and night, she knew not where, she still leaned forward towards her horse.

"Was he Blue Grass, then, dear old boy ?" she gently cooed at him in the darkness.

He evidently WAS, and responded by blowing her an ostentatious equine kiss.

"And he would be good to his own forsaken Belle," she murmured caressingly, "and wouldn't let any one harm her ?" But here, overcome by the lazy witchery of her voice, he shook his head so violently that Mrs.Tucker, after the fashion of her sex, had the double satisfaction of demurely restraining the passion she had evoked.
To avoid the more traveled thoroughfare, while the evening was still early, it had been arranged that she should at first take a less direct but less frequented road.

This was a famous pleasure-drive from San Francisco, a graveled and sanded stretch of eight miles to the sea and an ultimate "cocktail," in a "stately pleasure-dome decreed" among the surf and rocks of the Pacific shore.