has she told you?" Concha glanced up swiftly. His eyes were
blazing. She felt quite certain that he rolled a Russian oath under
his tongue, and she made a slight involuntary motion toward him, her
lips trembling apart.

"Nothing," she murmured. "I do not know--I do not know. But I no
longer wish her near me. She--life is very strange and terrible, senor.
You know it well--I, so little."

Rezanov felt his breath short and his hands cold. For a moment he made
no reply. Then he smiled charmingly and said in the conventional tone
that was ever at his command: "Of course you know little of life in
this Arcadia. One who hopes to be numbered among the best of your
friends prays that you never may. Yes, senorita, life is
strange--strangely commonplace and disillusionizing--but sometimes
picturesque. Believe me when I say that nothing stranger has ever
befallen me than to find out here on the lonely brink of a continent
nearly twenty thousand versts from Europe, a girl of sixteen with the
grand manner, and an intellect without the detestable idiosyncrasies of
the fashionable bas bleus I have hitherto had the misfortune to
encounter."

She was tapping the table slowly with her fork, and he noted that her
soft, childish mouth was set. "No doubt you are quite right to put me
off," she said finally, and in a voice as even as his own. "And my
intellect would do me little good if it did not teach me to ignore
mysteries I can never hope to fathom. There is no such thing as life
in your sense in this forgotten corner of the world, nor ever will be
in my time. If you come back and visit us twenty years hence you will
find me fat and worn like Elena, and busy every minute like my
mother--unless, indeed, I marry Don Weeliam Sturgis and become a great
lady in Boston. It would not be so mean a fate."

Rezanov darted a look of angry contempt at the pale young man who was
eating little and miserably watching the handsome pair at the head of
the table. "You will not marry him!" he said briefly.

"I could do far worse." Concha's lashes framed an adorable glance that
sent the blood to the hair of the sensitive youth. "You have no idea
how clever and good he is. And--Madre de Dios!--I am so tired of
California."

"But you are a part of it--the very symbol of its future, it seems to
me. I wish I had a sculptor in my suite. I should make him model you,
label the statue 'California,' and erect it on the peak of that big
is