lthough Isabel
rode briskly and was sensible as ever of the keen buoyant quality of the
morning air that so often filled her with a pagan indifference to the
human side of life, her thoughts were with the pleasant evening by her
fireside, the supper in the low raftered room which once had been the
office of the hotel--a supper of fried chicken, transparent asparagus,
and soda biscuit, which Gwynne had disposed of with a school-boy's
enthusiasm--the hundred and one impersonal topics they had discussed in
a cloud of smoke before the logs, until Abe, the second hired man--who
was to drive Gwynne in to Rosewater--had opened the kitchen door three
times and coughed. Not since Isabel's return to California had she sat
at a fireside and talked to anybody; nor, indeed, with the exception of
her father in his lucid intervals, and her uncle in his rare moments of
expansion, had she ever talked with any one that covered the large range
of her own interests. Gwynne had snapped the lock on his unquiet spirit,
but in that comfortable domestic environment, half lying in an
easy-chair, with his gaze travelling indolently between the fire and the
animated face of his cousin, he had talked of her favorite books and
told her much of lands she had never visited. He had transferred himself
to the buggy with a grumble of disgust, and begged her to come for him
early in the morning. He refused to pay his first visit to his ranch
without her; and she had promised that Abe should go early for his
saddle-horse and meet her at the hotel.

Pleasurable as the evening had been, Isabel was not in a sentimental
frame of mind; she was stirred at the prospect of a companion, and
wondered that she had been content in her solitude so long. Solitude and
complete liberty might be indispensable elements in her ideal of mortal
existence, but desultory companionship might be as necessary to
intensify them.

It was nearly a year since her return, and outside of the bank parlor
and Judge Leslie's office, she had held naught but business converse
with any man. Nor with any woman. Although Rosewater society offered her
nothing and she was glad to live out of town, still she liked her old
school friends and had expected them to call on her. But weeks had
passed and not one of them had paid her the mere civilities. She met
them sometimes on Saturday afternoons, when all the world of Rosewater
shopped on Main Street, and they invariably greeted her with effusion,
a