His wife! The words thrilled him. Day by day his mind wandered back over the events of the weeks that had passed since he came to Ohio. Day by day the portrait he carried in his mind changed, Alagwa’s boyish figure and boyish features melting slowly into the softer outlines of womanhood. Day by day he called back all that she had said and done until his heart glowed within him. How sweet she was! how dear! And how roughly he had used her, treating her as a mere boy instead of throning her as a queen. He ought to have guessed long before, he told himself. He ought to have known that no boy could be so gentle, so tender, so long-suffering. With shame he reconstructed the events of that last afternoon beneath the great tree when he had spoken of the “sweet, gentle lady” whom he might some day wed and had laughed at the suggestion that he might mate with a wild-wood lass like his boy friend. How could he have spoken as he did? Sally Habersham had been in his mind, of course. But Sally Habersham--Sally Habersham was not fit to tie the shoe of his little comrade; she was a mere ghost flitting through the corridors of a shadowy half-forgotten world, a million miles removed from that in which he dwelt. Fantine was right. What a man needed--on the frontier or off it--was not a fair face and a knowledge of the mazes of the minuet, but a staunch comrade, one who would grow into one’s life and would share the bitter and the sweet. Few men could win such a prize, and he--he had thought to do so carelessly, casually, by arguments that to his quickened consciousness seemed little better than insults. How had he ever dreamed that one so tender, so true, so loving, would accept his hand without his heart. She had called him a coward when he forced her to marry him. Well, he had been a coward; with shame he admitted it. No wonder she had fled from him. But he would find her and would tell her all the new-found love that welled in his heart. And she would believe him, for he would be speaking the truth. But how was he to find her? At last, when he was despairing, Father Francisco came to his aid. “My son,” said the priest. “I know not why your wife has left you----” “I don’t either.” Jack wrung his hands. “They tell me that it was something in a letter--a letter I can not even remember receiving. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! She loved me! I am sure she loved me. And she would not have left me willingly.” Keenly the priest looked into the lad’s face. “Do you love her?” he asked gently. Jack paled, but his eyes met the other’s squarely. “By heaven, I do,” he swore. “I did not know it. I married her for her honor’s sake. But now--now--I love her! I love her! For me there is no other woman in all the world and never shall be.” “And never was?” asked the priest gently.