so much as in that moment, when she sat with arrested breath and
realized to the full the primitive conditions of a country thousands of
miles from the very outposts of Europe, and with never the sight of a
letter that did not come from Spain or one of her colonies.

"Would that we lived a generation later," she thought with a heavy
sigh. "Progress is almost automatic, and to a land as fertile and
desirable as this the stream must turn in due course. But not in my
time. Not in my time."

She rose and leaned her elbows in the embrasure of the grille, where
Santiago had restored the bars, and looked out over the fields of grain
planted by the padres, the immense sand dunes beyond that shut the
lovely bay from sight; the hills embracing the primitive scene in a
frowning arc. With all her imagination it was long before she could
picture a great city covering that immense and almost deserted space.
A pueblo in time, perhaps, for Rezanov had awakened her mind to the
importance of the harbor as a port of call. Many more adobe homes
where the sand was not hot and shifting, a few ships in the bay when
Spain had been compelled to relax her jealous vigilance--or--who
knew?--perhaps!--a flourishing colony when the Russian bear had
devoured the Spanish lion. She knew something and suspected more of
the rottenness and inefficiency of Spain, and, were Russia a nation of
Rezanovs, what opposition in California against the tide thundering
down from the north? Then, perhaps, the city that had travelled from
the brain of the Russian to hers when the fog had rolled over the
heights; the towers and palaces and bazaars, the thousand little golden
domes with the slender cross atop; the forts on the crags and the
villas in the hollows, and on all the island and hills. But when she
and her lover were dust. When she and her lover were dust.

But she was too young and too ardent to listen long to the ravens of
the spirit. Two years are not eternity, and in happiness the past
rolls together like a scroll and is naught. She fell to dreaming. Her
lips that had been set with the gravity of stone relaxed in warm
curves. The color came back to her cheek, the light to her eyes. She
was a girl at her grating with the roses poignant above her, and the
world, radiant, alluring, and all for her, swimming in the violet haze
beyond.

XXII

Rezanov in those days was literally lord and master at the Presidio.
If he did not burn the hous