The boy’s advice was followed, and John Rayborne and Tom Hardy went to California, where Anita Raffael came in Mark’s way. She was an orphan,—alone in the world,—with no home but the convent in which her father had placed her at school before he died. With Mark it was at first only pastime to talk to the little half Spanish, half Mexican, when he chanced to meet her. Then something in her lovely face and soft, dark eyes began to appeal to him, and he accidentally discovered how much he was to her, and how forlorn she was in her convent home, where she was like an imprisoned bird beating its wings against the bars of its cage in its efforts to escape. No one was unkind to her; no one could be, she was so gentle and sweet. She was unhappy because she wanted freedom, and when Mark asked her to be his wife, she took him gladly, and was so loving, and happy and gay, that he never repented the act. She was not like Helen, nor was he like the Mark Hilton who had won the famous beauty. He was John Rayborne, and Anita was his wife, and their home was in the Yosemite, where she persuaded him to go, for she loved the wild, mountain scenery and made their cottage a bower of beauty, with her skillful hands and perfect taste. When she heard of a stage robbery she would get furious and stamp her little feet and denounce the robbers in her broken English, while Mark laughed at her excitement and asked, “What would you do if I were to take to the road some day?” “Kill you first, and then die myself,” she answered, with no more thought that such a thing could be than Mark himself had then. For a time he drove the stage in the summer between Milton and the valley, and was once or twice stopped on the road when Jeff was with him on the box. Thus, both “knew the ropes,” as Jeff said, criticising the manner of the attack and pointing out a better way, while Mark laughed at him, and without meaning what he said, suggested that he try it. Giving up stage-coaching, he became a guide, and then——. There was a deep, dark gulf after the then, and he always shuddered when he recalled the day when he joined Jeff in what he called a mere lark. Jeff had tried it alone, and, unknown to Mr. Hilton, to see if he could do it. He had profited by what he had seen on the road and laid his plans carefully as to what he would do in certain circumstances. As a boy he had picked pockets for fun, and he stopped the coach on the same principle, finding that the gymnastic performances of his youth were a help to him in the rapidity with which he could do his work and disappear. The stage which was the object of his first attempt was chosen because there was only one passenger in it, a clergyman, who had prayed aloud while he was being searched. “The old cove’s watch was silver, and he had only twenty-five dollars in his purse, and I gave them back to him. I never meant to take a blessed thing, and my revolver wasn’t loaded,” he said to Mark to whom he related his adventure.