for the capitalist placed at either
end of the footlights, while potted poinsettias and small madrona trees,
brought in from the bluffs above the grounds, finished the scheme with the
effect of an old mission garden. Then there were a hundred more
poinsettias disposed of, without crowding, on the landings and inside the
railing of the gallery, with five hundred red carnations arranged with
Oregon grape and fern in Indian baskets to cap the balustrade. To one
looking up from the lower hall, they had the appearance of quaint
jardiniere.

There was not too much color. December, in the Puget Sound country, means
the climax of the wet season when under the interminable curtain of the
rain, dawn seems to touch hands with twilight. It was hardly four o'clock
that Christmas eve when the _Aquila_ arrived with the guests from Seattle,
but the villa lights were on. A huge and resinous backlog, sending broad
tongues of flame into the cavernous throat of the fireplace, gave to the
illumination a ruddier, flickering glow. To Foster, who was the first to
reach the veranda, Foster who had been so long accustomed to faring at
Alaska road-houses, to making his own camp, on occasion, with a single
helper in the frosty solitudes, that view through the French window must
have seemed like a scene from the Arabian Nights. Involuntarily he
stopped, and suddenly the luxurious interior became a setting for one
living figure. Elizabeth was there, arranging trifles on a Christmas tree;
and Mrs. Feversham, seated at a piano, was playing a brilliant bolero; but
the one woman he saw held the center of the stage. Her sparkling face was
framed in a mantilla; a camellia, plucked from one of the flowering
shrubs, was tucked in the lace above her ear, and she was dancing with
castanets in the old mission garden.

The next moment Frederic passed him and threw open the door with his
inevitable "Bravo!" And instantly the music ceased; Marcia started to her
feet; the dancer pulled off her mantilla, and the flower dropped from her
hair.

"Go on! Encore!" he laughed. "My, but you've got that cachucha down to a
science; bred, though, I guess, in your little Spanish feet. You'd dance
all the sense a man has out of his head."

"That's the reason none of us heard the _Aquila_ whistle," said Marcia,
coming forward. "Beatriz promised to dance to-night, in a marvelous yellow
brocade that was her great-grandmother's, and we were rehearsing; but she
looked so like