Warm with the pity the thought inspired, he turned the corner into the street that led to the post-office, and was almost run down by the first mule of a train that came driving through the rain. "Bachelder!" the rider cried. It was surely Paul. Pulling up his beast, he thrust a wet hand from under his rain poncha, then, turning in his saddle, he spoke to the woman who rode behind him, "Ethel, this is Mr. Bachelder." The alternative had happened! As a small hand thrust back the hood of mackintosh, Bachelder found himself staring at a sweet face, while an equally sweet greeting was drowned by echoing questions in his mind. "Good God!" he first thought. "Why did he bring her here?" And upon that immediately followed, "How ever did he get her?" An evening spent with the pair at the small Mexican hotel increased his wonder. Pleasant, pretty, of a fine sensibility and intellectual without loss of femininity, the girl would have been fitly mated with a man of the finest clay. How could she have married Paul? Bachelder thought, and correctly, that he discerned the reason in a certain warmth of romantic feeling that tinged her speech and manner. Daughter of an Episcopal clergyman in Paul's native town, she had sighed for something different from the humdrum of small teas, dinners, parochial calls, and when Paul came to her with the glamour of tropical travel upon him, she married, mistaking the glamour for him. "She loved me for the dangers I had passed!" the artist mused, quoting Shakespeare, on his way home. "What a tragedy when she discovers him for a spurious Othello!" Dropping into the studio next morning, Paul answered the other question. "Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that we committed----" "That _you_ committed," Bachelder sharply corrected. "And what of the child?" Blinking in the old fashion, Paul went on, "I was coming to that. She cannot be allowed to grow up a little Mexican. I shall adopt her and have her properly educated." Here he looked at Bachelder as though expecting commendation for his honorable intention, and, receiving none, went on, dilating on his plans for the child as if resolved to earn it. Yet, setting aside this patent motive, it was easy to see as he warmed to his subject that Andrea had not erred in counting on Lola to bring him back. With her beauty she would do any man proud! The whole United States would not be able to produce her rival! She should have the best that money could give her! Wondering at the curious mixture of class egotism, paternal tenderness and twisted morality, Bachelder listened to the end, then said, "Of course, Mrs. Steiner approves of a ready-made family?"