So when she told him they would go to Sacramento, though the thought of change turned his heart to lead, he agreed with a good grace. He also acquiesced in all her injunctions about keeping their place of refuge a secret. When she told him of her plan to return Gault's money, he controlled his desire to disagree with it, and accepted her decision without open murmur. It seemed to him an unnecessary waste. What were the few paltry hundreds to the rich man? The colonel had been rich, too, and had aided hundreds of needy ones without ever thinking of repayment. By some obscure mental processes he had come to believe that Gault wanted the money. Now that the younger man had come between him and Viola, his feeling for him had become sharply hostile. It was only fear of reopening a disagreeable subject that prevented him from abusing his former friend to his daughter. They left the city with very different feelings. To the colonel his departure was as the dragging out of every fiber. The roots of his life seemed to have struck deep down into that sandy soil. His horizon had always been bounded by the long lines of gray houses, by the girdling blue of the bay. To the girl it seemed a flight from shame and misery. She was not escaping from it: part of it would go with her always; but she was putting behind her her own weakness and the temptation and despair that the weakness of others had brought upon her. As the train carried them farther away, as the bay faded out of sight, and the scarred and dwarf scrub-oaks gave place to the stately trees of the valleys, she felt her breath come with the sigh of a deep relief, and to her blank heart whispered the consolation, "It's over and done. I shall never see him again." At Sacramento they found shelter in a cheap boarding-house. It was a large old house on a side street, set back from the publicity of the thoroughfare in an extensive garden. The garden was so far cared for that it was watered, and the palms and aloes and fig-trees had reached a mighty growth; but its paths were weed-grown, and the statues and urns raised by its original owners lay overturned in the rank grass.