The drawing-room, where the piano stood, and where the windows opened out on the veranda and the lawn, was his harbor this night, as often when either his own thoughts or the selfish complainings of his wife drove him distractedly about the house. But this night there sounded a single soft strain through his "storming,"--as his wife called it,--and the strain grew wilder and sweeter, till suddenly lost, as the note of some clear-voiced, frightened bird is lost in the howling of the midnight storm.
Then had come days of calm, during which the piano remained closed, and he sat meekly under the drivelling talk of his wife, and in the close, dark atmosphere which alone, she insisted, suited the delicate complexion of her face and of her mind.
After that, an occasional letter from his brother-in-law, now at his station on the Rio Pecos, or an extra twist of the cord matrimonial, which, since the day of his marriage, seemed literally to encircle his neck, would set the lion to fuming in his cage; and, with the toss of his hair from the forehead, would commence the wandering through the house which always ended with "storming" the piano.
But the days are passing while we travel back into the past; and one, not far distant, brings Regina, the unwelcome. Before she had been in the house many days, she knew from her sister's rambling talk what Paul had said of her coming before she came--knew that he did not believe what the colonel had written about the disastrous effects of the New Mexican climate on his wife's health; but believed, rather, the rumors that had come to him from all sides, each varying a little from the rest in detail, but all agreeing in the main. Regina's marble face, and nervous, transparent fingers, might have confirmed the theory of failing health; but there was something in the momentary flash of her dark eyes, as she listened to her sister's quavering voice, that told of energy or despair, such as woman gains and gathers only from a sudden calling forth of all her passions and powers for the defence of her life, her honor, or position, as the case may be. It may have been only once, in the long past, that this power was called out; but, like the heat-lightning at the close of a hot, murky day, it throws baleful gleams on the cloud-darkened horizon of her life forever after.