He had had no self-accusing sense of disloyalty to Blandford in his practical nature; he had never suspected the shy, proper girl of being his wife; he was willing to believe now, that had he known it, even that night, he would never have seen her again; he had been very foolish; he had made this poor woman participate in his folly; but he had never been dishonest or treacherous in thought or action.

If Blandford had lived, even he would have admitted it.

Yet he was guiltily conscious of a material satisfaction in Blandford's death, without his wife's religious conviction of the saving graces of predestination.
They had been married quietly when the two years of her widowhood had expired; his former relations with her husband and the straitened circumstances in which Blandford's death had left her having been deemed sufficient excuse in the eyes of North Liberty for her more worldly union.

They had come to California at her suggestion "to begin life anew," for she had not hesitated to make this dislocation of all her antecedent surroundings as a reason as well as a condition of this marriage.

She wished to see the world of which he had been a passing glimpse; to expand under his protection beyond the limits of her fettered youth.