Jake Shackleton did not come up from San Mateo on Monday, as Mrs. Willers expected, and the first intimation he had of Lucy’s death was the short notice in the paper. He had come down the stairs early on Tuesday morning into the wide hall, with its doors thrown open to the fragrant air. With the paper in his hand, he stood on the balcony looking about and inhaling the freshness of the morning. The rain had washed the country clean of every fleck of dust, burnished every leaf, and had called into being blossoms that had been awaiting its summons. From beneath the shade made by the long, gnarled limbs of the live-oaks, the perfume of the violets rose delicately, their crowding clusters of leaves a clear green against the base of the hoary trunks. The air that drifted in from the idle, yellow fields beyond was impregnated with the breath of the tar-weed--one of the most pungent and impassioned odors Nature has manufactured in her vast laboratory, characteristic scent to rise from the dry, yet fecund grass-lands of California. In the perfect, crystalline stillness these mingled perfumes rose like incense to the new day. Shackleton looked about him, the paper in his hand. He had little love for Nature, but the tranquil-scented freshness of the hour wrung its tribute of admiration from him. What an irony that the one child he had, worth having gained all this for, should be denied it. Mariposa, thus framed, would have added the last touch to the triumphs of his life. With an exclamation of impatience he sat down on the top step, and opening the paper, ran his glance down its columns. He had been looking over it for several minutes before the death notice of Lucy struck his eye. It took away his breath. He read it again, at first not crediting it. He was entirely unprepared, having merely thought of Lucy as “delicate.” Now she was dead. He dropped the paper on his knee and sat staring out into the garden. The news was more of a shock than he could have imagined it would be. Was it the lately roused pride in his child that had reawakened some old tenderness for the mother? Or was it that the thought of Lucy, dead, called back memories of that shameful past? He sat, staring, till a step on the balcony roused him, and turning, he saw his son. Win, though only twenty-three, was of the order of beings who do not look well in the morning. He was slightly built and thin and had a rasped, pink appearance, as though he felt cold. Stories were abroad that Win was dissipated, stories, by the way, that were largely manufactured by himself. He was at that age when a reputation for deviltry has its attractions. In fact, he was amiable, gentle and far too lacking in spirit to be the desperate rake he liked to represent himself. He had a wholesome fear of his father, whose impatience against him was not concealed by surface politeness as in Maud’s case.