She must have surely dreamed it. A chill wind drove her back
to the house again; she entered her bedroom, and in half an hour she
was in a peaceful sleep.
V.
The two men kept their secret. Mr. Poindexter convinced Mrs. Tucker
that the sale of Los Cuervos could not be effected until the notoriety
of her husband's flight had been fairly forgotten, and she was forced
to accept her fate. The sale of her diamonds, which seemed to her to
have realized a singularly extravagant sum, enabled her to quietly
reinstate the Pattersons in the _tienda_ and to discharge in full her
husband's liabilities to the _rancheros_ and his humbler retainers.
Meanwhile the winter rains had ceased. It seemed to her as if the
clouds had suddenly one night struck their white tents and stolen away,
leaving the unvanquished sun to mount the vacant sky the next morning
alone, and possess it thenceforward unchallenged. One afternoon she
thought the long sad waste before her window had caught some tint of
grayer color from the sunset; a week later she found it a blazing
landscape of poppies, broken here and there by blue lagoons of lupine,
by pools of daisies, by banks of dog-roses, by broad outlying shores of
dandelions that scattered their lavish gold to the foot of the hills,
where the green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the
darker crests of pines.
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