elf this trip,
and I find I'm a very interesting though somewhat unappreciated old
party."

The young girl put down her laughing face, and her father swept a kiss
from it with his gray mustache. Then the two young creatures went out
into the lighted streets, laughing and clinging to each other in the
sweet, selfish happiness that is the preface to so large a part of the
world's misery.

They came back presently with their purchase, a somewhat obtrusively
ornate piece of jewelry, which Annette pronounced semi-barbarous;
being, she said, a compromise between her own severely classical taste
and that of Sterling, which latter, she assured her father, was entirely
savage.

She fastened the trinket at her throat, where it acquired a sudden and
hitherto unsuspected elegance in the eyes of her lover, and then
unclasped it, and held it at arm's-length in front of her before she
laid it in its pink cotton receptacle.

"I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft,
contented little sigh.

And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a
self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him.

Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping
the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and
stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor
of it all.

The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and
the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs.
Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head
from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between
two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his
shoulder.

"I want to see your daughter, the young girl,--the one that walked to
Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman.

"M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if
M'lissy's about?"

Her husband nodded backward.

"She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll"--

The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand.

"May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone."

Lysander bent his tall figure and moved along the rows of orange-trees,
until he caught a glimpse of Melissa's blue drapery.

"She's right down there," he said, pointing between the smooth trunks
with his hoe. "It's rough walkin',--I've just been a-throwin' up