It was not until after tea, when the family party were assembled in the drawing room, and Mrs. Force had sent away the two little girls, in charge of their governess, that the story of that marriage was told. There were present Mr. and Mrs. Force, Leonidas and Mrs. Anglesea. They were gathered around the open grate, where a glowing fire of sea coal burned. "Yes," said the woman, putting her feet upon the low, brass fender and drawing up the edge of her dress, to toast her ankles, "this is just as good a time to tell you all about it as any other, now that the young uns are gone to roost. I hate to talk about the wickedness of the world before the young uns; they will find it out quick enough for themselves, poor things! Well, you want to know what in the name o' sense ever possessed me to marry that beat, don't you?" she inquired of Mrs. Force. It was not exactly the way in which the lady had put the question of the marriage to herself, but she bowed her head in assent. "Well, then, my late husband, Zeb Wright, made a big fortune in the mines. Him and me was one of the very first that went out to the diggings. And he made his big pile by real hard hand work--and by none o' your blasting and crushing and lifting machines and things. "And the year he died he had put away a hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred and fifty dollars in the Californy Miners' Saving Bank. "And we might 'a' retired on that, but we was still in the prime o' life, nyther of us forty years old then--and I'm not now--and so he said we could go on for another ten year and make another hundred thousand, and then go back to the East and live offen it in grand style. "But, Lord! who can tell what a day may bring forth, let alone ten year? One autumn day he came home to me, in our shanty at Wild Cats' Gulch, with a hard chill, and in two hours, just as the turn of the cold fit into the hot one, he had a little spasm and went right off. "Well, I was all alone, having of no child'en. But the boys they was very good to me, and seen to the funeral and all that. And, after it was all over, I stayed on in the shanty, partly because I hated to leave it, and partly because the equinoctial storms had ris' the rivers and carried away the bridges, and made the travel between Wild Cats and St. Sebastian awful hard and risky. "In that first year of my widdyhood, I had a heap of offers from one and another of the boys, for there wa'n't many wimmin there; but I snubbed 'em all. "It wasn't till the next summer that I went to St. Sebastian to see about drawing out my money, or a part of it, to go East.