t
awhile; but remembering the heat of yesterday, she wished to make the
most of the early morning, deadly still and far from refreshing though
it was. The sea-breeze would come up later, she hoped, not without
misgivings; and the grapes were beginning to turn in the vineyards along
the road; she would have something to eat with the bit of corn-bread in
her pocket. Altogether she was not greatly concerned about herself or
the difficulties of her journey, so absorbed was she in the vague
uncertainty that lay at its end.

The sun rose hot and pitiless, and the dust and stones of the road grew
more and more scorching to her feet. The leaves of the wild gourd, lying
in great star-shaped patches on the ground, drooped on their stems, and
the spikes of dusty white sage by the road hung limp at the ends, and
filled the air with their wilted fragrance. The sea-breeze did not come
up, and in its stead gusts of hot wind from the north swept through the
valley as if from the door of a furnace. People talked of it afterward
as "the hot spell of 18--," but in Melissa's calendar it was "the day I
walked to Loss Anjelus,"--a day so fraught with hopes and fears, so full
of dim uncertainties and dread and longing, that the heat seemed only a
part of the generally abnormal conditions in which she found herself.

It was afternoon before she reached the end of her journey, entering the
town between rows of low, soft-tinted adobes, on the steps of which
white-shirted men and dusky, lowbrowed women and children ate melons and
laughed lazily at their neighbors, showing their gleaming teeth. She
knew where the courthouse stood, its unblushing ugliness protected by
the rusty Fremont cannon, and made her way wearily toward it through the
more modern and busier streets.

The men who sat in front of the stores in various degrees of undress,
slapping each other resoundingly on their thinly clad backs, and
discussing the weather with passers-by in loud, jocular tones, were, to
Melissa's sober country sense, a light-minded, flippant crowd, to whom
life could have no serious aspect. She looked at them indifferently, as
they sat and joked, or ran in and out of open doors where there was a
constant fizz as of something perpetually boiling over, and made her way
among them, quite unmindful of her dusty shoes and wilted sunbonnet, and
yet vaguely conscious that at another time she might have cared.

At the door of the courthouse, two of this same loosel