l spice of the bay-trees near his window.
He presently found himself not so much thinking of Yerba as of SEEING
her. A picture of her in the summer-house caressing her cheek with the
roses seemed to stand out from the shadows of the blank wall opposite
him. When he passed into the dressing-room beyond, it was not his own
face he saw in the glass, but hers. It was with a start, as if he had
heard HER voice, that he found upon his dressing-table a small vase
containing a flower for his coat, with the penciled words on a card in
a school-girl's hand, "From Yerba, with thanks for staying." It must
have been placed there by a servant while he was musing at the window.

Half a dozen people were already in the drawing-room when Paul
descended. It appeared that Mr. Woods had invited certain of his
neighbors--among them a Judge Baker and his wife, and Don Caesar
Briones, of the adjacent Rancho of Los Pajaros, and his sister, the
Dona Anna. Milly and Yerba had not yet appeared. Don Caesar, a young
man of a toreador build, roundly bland in face and murky in eye, seemed
to notice their absence, and kept his glances towards the door, while
Paul engaged in conversation with Dona Anna--if that word could convey
an impression of a conventionality which that good-humored young lady
converted into an animated flirtation at the second sentence with a
single glance and two shakes of her fan. And then Milly fluttered
in--a vision of school-girl freshness and white tulle, and a moment
later--with a pause of expectation--a tall, graceful figure, that at
first Paul scarcely recognized.

It is a popular conceit of our sex that we are superior to any effect
of feminine adornment, and that a pretty girl is equally pretty in the
simplest frock. Yet there was not a man in the room who did not
believe that Yerba in her present attire was not only far prettier than
before, but that she indicated a new and more delicate form of beauty.
It was not the mere revelation of contour and color of an ordinary
decollete dress, it was a perfect presentment of pure symmetry and
carriage. In this black grenadine dress, trimmed with jet, not only
was the delicate satin sheen of her skin made clearer by contrast, but
she looked every inch her full height, with an ideal exaltation of
breeding and culture. She wore no jewelry except a small necklace of
pearls--so small it might have been a child's--that fitted her slender
throat so tightly that it could s