are not California."

They passed out of the back gate and entered the middle woods. Magdalena
without hesitation led the way to the retreat hitherto sacred to Art.
Trennahan need not have apprehended that she would inflict him with her
manuscript, nor with hopes and fears: she was much too shy to mention
the subject unless he drew her deliberately; but she liked the idea of
associating him with this leafy and sacred temple.

He threw himself on his back at once, clasping his hands under his head
and gazing up into the rustling storeys above. About his head was a low
persistent hum, a vibration of a sound of many parts. Above were only
the intense silences of a hot California morning.

Trennahan forgot Magdalena for the moment. He felt young again and very
content. His restless temperament, fed with the infinite varieties of
Europe, had seldom given way to the pleasures of indolence. Even satiety
had not meant rest. But California--as distinct from San Francisco--with
her traditions of luxurious idleness, the low languid murmur of her
woods, her soft voluptuous air, her remoteness from the shrieking nerve
centres of the United States, the sublime indifference of her people to
the racing hours, drew so many quiet fingers across his tired brain,
half obliterating deep and ugly impressions, giving him back something
of the sense of youth and future. Perhaps he dimly appreciated that
California is a hell for the ambitious; he knew that it was the
antechamber of a possible heaven to the man who had lived his life.

He turned suddenly and regarded Magdalena, wondering how much she had to
do with his regeneration, if regeneration it were, and concluded that
she was merely a part of California the whole. But she was a part as was
no other woman he had met.

She had clasped her hands about her knees and was staring straight
before her. Trennahan, in a rare flash of insight, saw the soul of the
girl, its potentialities, its beauty, struggling through the deep mists
of reserve.

"I could love her," he thought; "and more, and differently, than I have
loved any other woman."

He determined in that moment to marry her. As soon as he had made his
decision, he had a sense of buoyancy, almost of happiness, but no
rejuvenation could destroy his epicureanism; he determined that the slow
awakening of her nature, of revealing her to herself, should be a part
of the happiness he promised himself. He was proud that he could love
the s