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.
CHAPTER 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 gayer
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 crest
of pines.
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