"This lady are my wife," he said, with dignity. "She not any more Miss Parsloe."
"Oh, Grace has got married!" exclaimed the young ladies, one to another; and then an elderly man, evidently in authority, came forward and said, "I suppose you are aware, sir, that Miss Parsloe was formerly one of our girls here; and a very clever and useful girl she was. I need not say how sorry we are for this accident: I have sent for the physician: but I cannot but be glad that the misfortune has at least given me the opportunity of telling you how highly your wife was valued and respected here."
At this juncture, Grace opened her eyes: she looked from one face to another, and knew that fate had brought the truth to light. But the physical shock tempered the severity of the mental one: besides, she could not help being pleased at the sight of so many well-remembered and friendly faces; and, finally, her husband did not look by any means so angry and scandalized as she had feared he would. Indeed, he appeared almost gratified. The truth probably was, he was flattered to see his wife the centre of so much interest and attention, and at the discovery that she had been in some way an honored appanage of so imposing an establishment. So, by the time Grace was well enough to be driven back to her hotel, the senor was prattling cheerfully and familiarly with all and sundry, and was promising to bring his wife back there the next day, to talk over old times with her former a.s.sociates.
Such was Grace"s punishment: it was not very severe; but then her fault had been a venial one; and the episode was of much moral benefit to her.
She liked her husband all the better for having nothing more to conceal from him; her vanity was rebuked, and her false pride chastened; and when, in after-years, her pretty daughters and black-haired sons gathered about her knees, she was wont to warn them sagely against the un-American absurdity of fearing to work for their living, or being ashamed to have it known.
But the married life of Miriam and Harvey Freeman was characteristically American in its happiness. The representatives of the oldest and of the latest inhabitants of this continent, their union seemed to produce the flower of what was best in both. Their wedding is still remembered in that region, as being everything that a Southern Californian wedding should be; and the bride, as she stood at the altar, looked what she was,--one of those women who, more than anything else in this world, are fitted to bring back to earth the gentle splendors of the Garden of Eden. In her dark eyes, as she fixed them upon Freeman, there was a mystic light, telling of fathomless depths of tenderness and intelligence: it seemed to her husband that love had expanded and uplifted her; or perhaps that other spirit in her, which had battled with her own, had now become reconciled, and therefore yielded up whatever it had of good and n.o.ble to aggrandize the gentle victory of its conqueror. Somehow, somewhere, in Miriam"s nature, Semitzin lived; and, as a symbol of the peace and atonement that were the issue of her strange interior story, her husband preserves with reverence and affection the mysterious garment called the Golden Fleece.