“But if she loved him, Richie—­and Ted was so young!”

“All true, of course, only if you’re going to push things to the point of taking advantage of a quibble like that, your chance of happiness is more or less slim!  So three years ago Carleton proved that he hadn’t cared a whoop about the legal or religious aspects of the case, and left Ted.  And now Ted can’t see herself, at twenty-seven, tied to another woman’s husband!”

“She has her boy,” Julia said severely.

“Yep, but that doesn’t seem to count.”

“Well, it’s funny, Richie, take us all in all, what a mess we’ve made of marrying!” Julia mused.  “Ned gives me the impression, every time I see him, of being a sulky martyr in his own home; Sally’s managed to drag happiness out of a most hopeless situation; Ted, of course, will never be happy again, like Jim and me; and Connie, although she made an exemplary marriage, either has to leave her husband or bring her baby up in Manila, which she says positively isn’t safe!  Bab is the only shining success among us all!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Richie said, stopping the horse, and flinging the reins to the Portuguese who came out of a small barn to meet them.  “Here we are, Ju—­take your time!  I’ve always considered you rather successful,” he resumed.

“Oh, me!” Julia laughed as she jumped down like a girl.  She followed Anna across a little hollow filled with buttercups and long grasses, and they mounted the little rise to Richie’s tiny cabin.  The little house had Mount Tamalpais for a background, and its wide unroofed porch faced across the valley, and commanded a view of the wooded ridges, and the marshes, and the distant bay, and of San Francisco twelve miles away.  Scrub oaks and bay trees grew in a tangle all about it, even a few young redwoods and an occasional bronze and white madrona tree.  Wild roses and field flowers crowded against its very walls, and under the trees there were iris and brown lilies, and a dense undergrowth of manzanita and hazelnut bushes, wild currant and wild lilac trees.

The big room that Julia entered first was dim with pleasant twilight, and full of the sweet odours of a dying wood fire.  It had nothing of distinction in it:  a few shabby chairs, an old square piano, an unpainted floor crossed here and there by rugs, books in cases and out of them, candlesticks along the brick mantel, a green-shaded student’s lamp on a long table, and several wide windows, dim and opaque now in the fast-gathering darkness, but usually framing each a picture of matchless mountain scenery.