Nor was Sandy Ray the ass he declared himself, for if ever that exquisite, catlike creature, Inez, loved anybody besides herself, she loved Sandy Ray, and was bent on winning him back, cost what it might. She quickly saw that his love for her lay dormant, not dead. She reveled in the joy of her probable power until, all on a sudden, one terrible night there came to her the shock of seeing a face she believed long since buried beneath the waves of the Pacific--that of the boy lover and husband who wooed and won her inflammable heart nearly five years earlier. Blenke in a romantic epistle to Miss Sanford, Inez, through her lawyers, and her latest dupe, Stanley Foster--whose resignation from the army went eastward by the same train that bore him and that fair fugitive from Minneconjou--and finally the impeccable Farrells, all gave versions more or less veracious of that early marriage episode. But sifted down, this much of truth was ascertained. The two were cousins, with the vehement blood of the Antilles coursing in their veins. They loved, were married by a Texan justice of the peace, and, after a brief honeymoon across the Mexican line--a honeymoon of mingled bliss and battle--found the old people relentless and themselves squabbling and stranded. The elders swooped upon the girl-wife, bore her back to Texas and sent the strolling player to South America, with the promise never to return or bother them. They told her, and she refused to believe, that he speedily met his death at the hands of a jealous husband in Valparaiso. They later told her, and she fully believed, that, in defiance of his promise and in desire for her, he had determined to reclaim her as they were going to San Francisco, and was washed overboard from the _Colima_ by a tidal wave. Inez, like a certain few of her sex, could believe anything possible for love--of her, and Stanley Foster went far toward confirming her views for as much as the month that followed their mad flight. Then, with his commission gone--and his illusions--he found himself bound to a woman whose fast-fading charms were no compensation for anything he had lost. Much of their misery, and her own, was told in metropolitan circles by Félicie, who applied unsuccessfully about this time to Mrs. Gerald Stuyvesant for the position of nursery governess, or _bonne_. Félicie had gone thither in hopes of extracting something from Foster's people, as nothing could be gotten from the Farrells since nothing short of extradition proceedings could induce their return to the States. It was the same miserable old story, and Sandy Ray many a time thanked Heaven, and Stone, and the senior surgeon, for the order that took him to the agency and away from Inez Dwight. Would he have succumbed had he stayed? Older and presumably wiser men have done worse, so why not Sandy? Perhaps mother and Priscilla were not all wrong in their forebodings.