eyes--wonderful for their brilliance and color and the shadows that
lurked in them, like the ghosts of a sorrow ineffable. Up to the day
she died nobody in San Pasqual knew very much about her--where she came
from or why she came. She gave no confidences and invited none. In a
general way it was known that she was a widow. Her husband had gone
away and never returned, and it was a moot question in San Pasqual
whether the Widow Corblay was grass or natural. Be that as it may, the
fact remains that the absent one was missed and that his wife remained
faithful to his memory, as several frontier gentlemen, who had sought
her hand in marriage, might have testified had they so desired.

Mrs. Corblay lived for her child, and was accused of being wantonly and
sinfully extravagant in her manner of dressing this child. She
maintained and supported two Indian servants, which fact alone raised
her a notch or two socially above the wives, sisters and daughters of
the railroad men and local business men who lived in the cottages west
of the tracks. A great many of these estimable females disliked her
accordingly and charged her with "'puttin' on airs." Indeed, more than
one of them had ventured the suggestion that Mrs. Corblay had a past,
and that her child was its outward expression. Of course, they couldn't
prove anything, but--and there the matter rested, abruptly. That "but"
ended it, even as the tracks end at the bumper in a roundhouse. One
felt the jar just the same.

Some hint of this provincial interest in her and her affairs must have
reached Mrs. Corblay shortly after her arrival, so with true feminine
obstinacy she declined to alleviate the abnormal curiosity which gnawed
at the heart of the little community. She died as she had lived,
considerable of a mystery, and San Pasqual, retaining its resentment of
this mystery, visited its resentment upon Donna Corblay when Donna, in