In the spring in San Francisco the trade winds come and all wise Californians move inland. In the early seventies the exodus to the country was not noticeably large. Rural hotels were still small and primitive. To be able to evade the fog-laden breath of the trades was the luxury of the well-to-do, and the well-to-do evaded them by retiring to country houses which dotted the teeming reaches of the Santa Clara Valley, or sought the shelter of the live-oaks where the golden floor of the valley slopes up into the undulations of the hills.

The Allens moved down early in April. Their father, after an afternoon’s excursion in a buggy with a real estate agent, came back one evening and told them he had rented the De Soto house, back of San Mateo, for three years, and they must be ready to move into it in a week.

He was full of business and hurry in these days, and said he could not help them much. Neither would he be with them a great deal, as he would spend most of his summer in town with occasional trips to Virginia City. Crown Point was steadily rising and the rumors of a new bonanza were on every tongue. Rion Gracey had not returned, and Black Dan had ridden over the mountains into the Nevada camp on his own horse, a dislike for modern modes of locomotion being one of his peculiarities. Allen had bought heavily of the rising stock and seen himself on the road to even more dazzling fortune. He had rented the De Soto place for the highest price any real estate agent had yet dared to ask. People who knew of the rate of his expenditure talked of a beggar on horseback. But the Barranca was paying well and the twenty-stamp mill was up and going.

The De Soto estate was part of the princely grant that the Señorita Esperanza de Soto brought as a marriage portion to her husband, Peter Kelley, a sailor from a New England clipper which touched at Yerba Buena in thirty-eight. At the time the Allens rented it, part of the great tract had been parceled out and sold to householders. The central portion, where Peter and the Señora Kelley had built a stately home, was practically as it had been when the Yankee seaman first ranged over it and realized the riches of his bride. Now both sailor and señora were dead, and their only son, Tiburtio Kelley, preferred a life in Paris on the large fortune accumulated by his thrifty father, to the dolce far niente of empty, golden days in the Santa Clara Valley.

This central strip of the tract, which ran from the valley up into the first spurs of the hills, was still a virgin wilderness. Huge live-oaks, silvered with a hoar of lichen, stretched their boughs in fantastic frenzies. Gray fringes of moss hung from them, and tangled screens of clematis and wild grape caught the sunlight in their flickering meshes or lay over mounds of foliage like a torn green veil. The silence of an undesecrated nature dreamed over all. Woodland life seldom stirred the dry undergrowth, the rustle of nesting birds was rare in the secret leafy depths of the oaks. Here and there the murmurous dome of the stone pine soared aloft, the clouded dusk of its foliage almost black against the sky.

For nearly two miles the carriage drive wound upward through this sylvan solitude. As it approached the house a background of emerald lawns shone through the interlacing of branches, and brilliant bits of flower beds were set like pieces of mosaic between gray trunks. The drive took a sweep around a circular parterre planted in geraniums—a billowing bank of color under a tent of oak boughs—and ended in a wide, graveled space at the balcony steps.

The house was a spreading, two-story building of wood, each floor surrounded by a deep balcony upon which lines of French windows opened. Flowering vines overhung, climbed and clung about the balcony pillars and balustrades. Roses drooped in heavy-headed cascades from second-story railings; the wide purple flowers of the clematis climbed aloft. On one wall a heliotrope broke in lavender foam and the creamy froth of the bankshur rose dabbled railings and pillars and dripped over on to the ground. It was a big, cool, friendly looking house with a front door that in summer was always open, giving the approaching visitor a hospitable glimpse of an airy, unencumbered hall.

The move completed, June and Rosamund began to taste the charm of the Californian’s summer life. There were no hotels near them. No country club had yet risen to bring the atmosphere of the city into the suave silence of the hills. It was a purely rural existence: driving and riding in the morning, reading in the hammock under the trees, receiving callers on the balcony in the warm, scented end of the afternoon, going out to dinner through the dry, dewless twilight and coming home under the light of large, pale stars in a night which looked as transparently dark as the heart of a black diamond.

They were sometimes alone, but, as a rule, the house contained guests. The Colonel at first came down constantly, always from Saturday to Monday and now and then for a week-day evening. But in May the sudden leap of Crown Point to one hundred and eighty upset the tranquillity of even cooler natures than Jim Parrish’s, and the stock exchange became the center of men’s lives. The long expected bonanza had been struck. The San Franciscans, once more restored to confidence in the great lode, were seized with their old zest of speculation, and all the world bought Crown Point. Allen saw himself on the road to a second fortune, and threw his money about in Virginia with an additional gusto, as it had been the scene of some of his poorest days.

Even the Colonel was attacked by the fever and invested. His financial condition had given him grounds for uneasiness lately, and here was the chance to repair it. A mine in Shasta, in which he had been a large owner, shut down. He owned property in South Park, and the real estate agents were beginning to shake their heads at the mention of South Park property. It surprised him to realize that for the first time in years he was short of ready money. He sold two buildings far out among the sand dunes on upper Market Street, and with the rest of his kind bought Virginia mining stock with Crown Point and Belcher at the head.

Under the live-oaks back of San Mateo the girls only faintly heard the rising rush of the excitement. The current circled away from their peaceful corner, lapped now and then by a belated ripple. The country life they both loved filled them with contentment and health. Rosamund took to gardening again. Her face shaded by a large Mexican hat, she might be seen of a morning in confab with the Irish gardener, astonishing him by her practical knowledge. In the evening she surreptitiously “hosed” the borders, wishing that her visitors would go back to town and leave her to the peaceful pursuit of the work she delighted in and understood.

June was not so energetic. She did not garden or do much of anything, save now and then go for a walk in the wild parts of the grounds.

As might be expected, Mrs. Barclay always moved down to San Mateo in April. She was not rich enough to own a large country place, but she did the best that was in her and rented a pretty cottage outside the village. Here Jerry came from town every Saturday and stayed till Monday morning, and to her surprise not infrequently appeared unannounced on week-day afternoons, saying that business was dull, and there was no necessity waiting about in town. The year before she had complained greatly that her son’s visits to San Mateo were rare. This summer she had no such grievance. He kept a horse in her small stable, and as soon as he arrived had it saddled and went out for a ride. Sometimes on Sunday he rode over and called on the Allens, but there were other people to visit in the neighborhood and he did not go to the Allens’—so he told his mother—as often as he would have liked.

The direction he took on the week-day afternoons was always the same. No rain falls during the California summer, there are no dark hours of thunder and cloud; it is a long procession of blue and gold days, steeped in ardent sunshine, cooled by vagrant airs, drowsy with aromatic scents—a summer made for lovers’ trysts.

Half-way up the winding drive to the De Soto house Jerry had learned there was a path through the underbrush which led to an opening, deep in the sylvan wilderness, under the thick-leaved roof of an oak. It had been a favorite spot of the late Señora Kelley’s, and all the poison oak had been uprooted. With the canopy of the tree above—a ceiling of green mosaic in which the twisted limbs were imbedded—and the screen of lightly hung, flickering leafage encircling it, it was like a woodland room, the bower of some belated dryad.

Sometimes Jerry had to wait for her, and lying prone on the ground, his horse tethered to a tree trunk near by, lay looking up, his senses on the alert to catch her step. Sometimes she was there first, and as he brushed through the covert, he saw her dress gleaming between the leaves in a spattering of white. His heart was beginning to beat hard at the sound of her advancing footfall. While he waited for her he thought of nothing, his whole being held in a hush of expectancy. When she came he found it difficult for the first moment to speak easily.

On an afternoon early in June he sat thus waiting. All the morning the thought of this meeting had filled his mind, coming between him and his business. On the train coming down the anticipation of it held him in a trance-like quietude. He talked little to his mother at lunch. He kept seeing June as she came into sight between the small, delicately leaved branches, dots of sun dancing along her dress, her eyes, shy and full of delight, peeping through the leaves for him. He answered his mother’s questions at random and ate but little. The picture of the white-clad girl grew in intensity, striking him into motionless reverie, so that, his eyes fixed, he seemed scarcely to breathe.

It was very warm. Lying on his back on the dried grass, his hands clasped under his head, he gazed straight before him at the long fringes of moss that hung from a gnarled bough. His senses were focused in an effort to disentangle her footstep from the drowsy noises of the afternoon. All scruples, apprehensions of danger, were swept away by the hunger for her presence. His mind had room for no other thought. Every nerve was taut, every sense quiveringly alert, as he lay, still as a statue, waiting for her.

Suddenly he rose on his elbow staring sidewise in the concentration of his attention. The subdued, regular brush of her dress against the leaves came softly through the murmurous quietness. He sprang to his feet, strangely grave, his glance on the path she came by. In a moment her figure speckled the green with white, and she came into view, hurrying, sending sharp, exploring looks before her. She saw him, instantly fell to a slower pace, and tried to suppress the gladness of her expression. But he saw it all, and the quick breath that lifted her breast. Her hand hardly touched his, and moving a little away from him, she sank down on the ground, her white skirts billowing round her. She pressed them into folds with arranging pats, avoiding his eyes, and repeating some commonplaces of greeting.

Jerry returned to his reclining posture, lying on his side, his elbow in the grass, his hand supporting his head. He, at first, made no pretense of moving his eyes from her, and answered her remarks shortly and absently.

Against the background of variegated greens she presented a harmony of clear, thin tints like a water color. Her dress of sheer, white muslin was cut away from the throat in a point, and smoothly covering her arms and neck, let them be seen beneath its crisp transparency, warmly white under the cold white of the material. The heat of the afternoon and the excitement of the meeting had called up a faint pink to her cheeks. In her belt she had thrust a branch of wistaria and the trail of blossoms hung down along her skirt. She wore a wide leghorn hat, and in this she had fastened another bunch, the flowers lying scattered across the broad rim, and one spray hanging over its edge and mingling with the curls that touched her neck.

Jerry had never seen her look as she did this afternoon. Love, that she felt assured was returned, had lent her the fleeting beauty of an hour. She did not seek to penetrate the future. The happiness of the present sufficed her. She said little, plucking at a tuft of small wild flowers that grew beside her, conscious to her inmost fiber of her lover’s eyes.

“Why don’t you take off your hat?” he said. “There’s no sun here.”

She obediently took it off and threw it on the ground. The black velvet she wore around her head had become disarranged and she raised her hands to draw it into place and tuck a loosened curl under its restraint. He watched her fixedly.

“Now,” he said, reaching out to draw the hat to him and taking one of the wistaria blossoms from it, “put this in.”

“I have no glass,” she demurred, stretching a hand for the flower.

“That doesn’t matter. I’ll be your glass. I’ll tell you if it isn’t all right.”

She tucked the stem of the blossom into the velvet band, so that its trail of delicate lavender bells fell downward behind her ear.

“How is that?” she said, facing him, her eyes downcast. Her coquetries of manner had deserted her. With the flush on her face a glowing pink and her lashes on her cheeks, she was a picture of uneasy embarrassment.

“Perfect,” he answered. He continued to stare at her for a moment and then said suddenly in a low voice,

“Good heavens, how you’ve changed! It’s a little over a year now that I’ve known you and you’re an entirely different person from the girl with the short hair I met up at Foleys. What have you done to yourself? What is it that has changed you?”

“I think it’s because I’m happy,” she said, beginning again to pick the wild flowers.

“Why are you happy?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I—” she paused and began to arrange her flowers in a careful bunch.

He suddenly dropped his eyes to the ground and there was a silence. The sleepy murmur of insects rose upon it. The sun, in an effort to penetrate the inclosure, scattered itself in intermittent flickerings of brilliant light that shifted in golden spots along the tree trunks or came diluted through the webbing of twigs and vine tendrils. It was still very hot and the balsamic odors of bay-tree and pine seemed to grow more intense with the passing of the hour.

“You were such a quiet little thing up there,” Jerry went on, “working like a man in that garden of yours and never wanting to go anywhere. Things down here may have made you happy, but I sometimes wonder if they haven’t made you frivolous, too.”

When Jerry ceased staring at her and began to talk in this familiar, half-bantering strain, she felt more at ease, less uncomfortable and conscious. She seized the opening with eagerness and said, smiling down at her little bouquet:

“But you know I am frivolous. I love parties and pretty clothes and lots of money to spend, and all the good times going. I was that way at Foleys, only I didn’t have any of those things. I can be serious, too, if it’s necessary. When I haven’t got the things to be frivolous with, I can do without.”

He stretched out his hand and plucked a long stalk of feather-headed grass.

“Can you?” he said indolently. “Are you sure you’re not telling a little story?”

“No, no, quite sure. I have two sides to my character, a frivolous one and a serious one. You ought to know that by now.”

“Which have you shown to me oftenest?” He was peeling the stalk of its shielding blade of grass.

“I don’t know. That’s for you to say. Perhaps it’s been an even division.”

He looked up. She was smiling slightly, her dimple faintly in evidence.

“And I suppose the dimple,” he said, “belongs to the frivolous side.”

“Yes. Even my face has two sides; the frivolous one with the dimple and the serious one without.”

“Let me see them,” he said. “Let me judge which of the two is the more attractive.”

He leaned forward and with the tip of the long spear of grass, touched her lightly on the cheek.

“Turn,” he commanded, “turn, till I get a good profile view.”

She turned, presenting her face in profile, pure as a cameo against the leafy background.

“That’s the serious side,” she said, raising her chin slightly, so that her curls slipped back, disclosing her ear.

“And now for the frivolous,” he answered. “I don’t seem to know the serious side so well.”

She turned her head in the other direction, her eyes down-drooped. He drew himself nearer to her over the ground, the grass spear in his hand.

“And so this is the frivolous. Shouldn’t the dimple be here?”

He touched her cheek again with the tip of the grass, and as he did so the dimple trembled into being. She looked at him slantwise, laughing, with something breathless in the laughter.

As she met his glance her laughter died away. His face had changed to something unfamiliar and hard. He was pale, his eyes fierce and unloving. For a moment she looked at him, some phrase of inquiry dying on her lips, then she made an attempt to rise, but he drew close to her and caught her hands. She turned her head away, suddenly white and frightened.

“June,” he whispered, “do you know how much I love you?”

It was a whisper unlike anything she had ever heard before. A whisper within herself responded to it. She sat still, trembling and dizzy, and felt his arms close about her, and her consciousness grow blurred as his lips were pressed on hers.

The instant after he had loosed her and they had shrunk from each other in guilty terror, the girl quivering with a rush of half comprehended alarm, the man struggling with contending passions. His face seemed to her full of anger, almost of hatred, as he cried to her,

“Go home. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have touched you. We can’t come here again this way. I’m not free to love you. Go home.”

He made an imperious gesture for her to go, almost as though driving her from his presence. White as death and dazed by the terrifying strangeness of it all, she scrambled to her feet, and turning from him, set out at a run. She brushed through the bushes, her eyes staring before her, her breast straining with dry sobs. In one hand she still held her little bunch of wild flowers, and with the other she made futile snatches at her skirt, which she had trodden upon and torn.

Gaining the end of the wood, she came into the open garden, glaring with sun, deserted and brilliant. Back of it stood the house, shuttered to the afternoon heat and drowsing among its vines. She was about to continue her course over the grass to the open front door, when a footstep behind her, rapid as her own, fell on her ear. For an instant of alert, lightly poised terror, she paused listening, then shot forward across the grass and on to the drive. But her pursuer was fleeter than she. Close at her shoulder she heard him, his voice full of commanding urgency.

“Stop, I must speak to you.”

She obeyed as she must always obey that voice, and wheeled around on him, pallid and panting.

“June, dearest, forgive me. I forgot myself and I’ve frightened you. But we mustn’t meet—that way—any more.”

She looked at him without answering. He was as pale as she. The lower part of his face seemed to tremble. He had difficulty in controlling it and speaking quietly.

“It’s true what I said,” he went on. “I love you. I’ve done so for months. I was to blame, horribly to blame. You’re so young—such a child. I was the one to blame for it all.”

“For what?” she said. “What’s there to blame anybody for? What has happened all of a sudden?”

He came closer to her and looked her steadily in the eye.

“I am not free,” he said in the lowest audible voice. “I can’t marry you. I am not free.”

She repeated with trembling lips,

“Not free! Why not?”

“No. If I were—oh, June, if I were!” He turned away as if to go, then turned back, and said,

“Oh, June, if I were, we would be so happy! If I could undo the past and take you—!”

His voice broke and he looked down, biting his underlip. She understood everything now, and for the moment speech was impossible. There was a slight pause, and then he said,

“I wouldn’t let myself see the way it was going. I lied to myself. I loved you better every day, and I persuaded myself I didn’t, and that it was nothing but a friendship to both of us. We mustn’t meet this way any more. But we will see each other sometimes at people’s houses? We’re not to be strangers.”

She turned dazedly away from him to go to the house. For a step or two he let her go. Then he followed her, caught her hand with its bunch of limp flowers, and said with urgent desperation:

“I’ll see you sometimes. I can’t give you up entirely. Perhaps—perhaps—later, when time has passed, we can be friends. June, I can’t give it all up like this.”

She turned on him a face whose expression pierced through his egotism.

“Let me go into the house,” she whispered. “I can’t say anything now. Let me go into the house.”

He dropped her hand, and turning, walked rapidly toward the driveway. June ran to the house.

It was wrapped in complete silence. Not a sound or movement came from it. She had but one idea, to mount the stairs unseen, gain her room and then lock the door. Noiseless and fleet-footed she sped up the veranda steps, flew through the open door, and then cowered against the wall. Rosamund was on the stairs coming down.

“June,” she said sharply, “where did Jerry Barclay come from, and what was he saying to you out there? I’ve been watching you from the window.”

Then she saw her sister’s face. Her own changed in a flash. Its severity vanished, and concern, alarm, love, took its place. She ran downward to the figure at the stair-foot, pressed against the wall.

“What’s happened? June, what’s the matter?”

Her startled whisper broke the sunny stillness with a note of the deadly realism of life amid the sweet unconcern of nature. She tried to clasp June, who made an effort to squeeze past her, crushed against the wall, her head down, like one who fears recognition. When, finding it impossible to escape, she suddenly collapsed at Rosamund’s feet, curled up like a person in physical anguish, and cried with smothered violence,

“He’s not free, Rosamund. It’s all over; everything’s over. It’s all true, and we’ve got to end it all. He’s not free.”

Rosamund realized vaguely what had happened. She was a loving woman, but she was a practical one, too. There were people in the house who must not see June just at this crisis. She was much the larger and stronger of the two girls, and she bent down and attempted to raise the prostrate figure.

“June, listen. We were going out driving at five. Mary Moore may be down at any moment. Come quick; she mustn’t see you. She’s the worst gossip in San Francisco. Come, I’ll help you.”

She dragged the girl up with an arm around her, hurried her to the top of the stairs, along the hall, and into her room. There she let her fall into an arm-chair, and, stepping back, locked the door.

In the sweet-scented, airy room, with its thin muslin curtains softening the hot brilliancy of the landscape, June sat in the arm-chair, silent and motionless, her face pinched. Rosamund, who had never seen her sister like this, did not know what to do, and in despair, resorted to the remedies she had been accustomed to using when her mother had been ill. She softly rubbed June’s temples with cologne and fanned her. Finally she knelt down by her side and said tenderly,

“What is it, Junie, dear? Tell it to me.”

“I have told it to you,” said June. “He’s not free; that’s all. You all said it, but I wouldn’t believe it. Now he’s said it and I’ve got to believe it.”

She spoke in a high, hard voice, and Rosamund, kneeling on the floor, put her arms round her, and said with ingenuous consolation,

“But now you know it, the worst’s over.”

“Everything’s over,” said June dully.

Her eyes fell to her lap, and there, in one hand, she saw the wilted remains of the little bunch of wild flowers. A sudden realization of what her feelings had been when she picked them, how joyous, how shyly happy, how full of an elated pleasure of life, and what they were now, fell upon her with desolating force. She gave a cry, and, turning from her sister, pressed her face against the back of the chair and burst into a storm of tears.