of the streets and thoroughfares was meaningless to them, except to
revive strange memories of the deep, unvarying monotone of the evening
wind over their humbler roof on the Sierran hillside. Civic bred and
nurtured as they were, the recurrence of these sensations perplexed and
alarmed them.

"It seems so perfectly ridiculous," said Jessie, "for us to feel as out
of place here as that Pike County servant girl in Sacramento who had
never seen a steamboat before; do you know, I quite had a turn the other
day at seeing a man on the Stockton wharf in a red shirt, with a rifle
on his shoulder."

"And you wanted to go and speak to him?" said Christie, with a sad
smile.

"No, that's just it; I felt awfully hurt and injured that he did not
come up and speak to ME! I wonder if we got any fever or that sort of
thing up there; it makes one quite superstitious."

Christie did not reply; more than once before she had felt that
inexplicable misgiving. It had sometimes seemed to her that she had
never been quite herself since that memorable night when she had
slipped out of their sleeping-cabin, and stood alone in the gracious and
commanding presence of the woods and hills. In the solitude of night,
with the hum of the great city rising below her--at times even in
theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women--she forgot herself,
and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in
mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled
terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to
the lonely skies. Again she felt before her the expanding and opening
arms of the protecting woods. Had they really closed upon her in some
pantheistic embrace that made her a part of them? Had she been baptized
in that moonlight as a child of the great forest? It was easy to believe
in the myths of the poets of an idyllic life under those trees, where,
free from conventional restrictions, one loved and was loved. If she,
with her own worldly experience, could think of this now, why might
not George Kearney have thought? . . . She stopped, and found herself
blushing even in the darkness. As the thought and blush were the usual
sequel of her reflections, it is to be feared that they may have been at
times the impelling cause.

Mr. Carr, however, made up for his daughters' want of sympathy with
metropolitan life. To their astonishment, he not only plunged into the
fashionable gayeties and amusement