e delicate nervous outlines of her face
near his own again; the faint shading of her brown lashes, the soft
intelligence of her gray eyes. Drifting idly in the placid moonlight,
pulling feverishly across the swell of the channel, or lying on his oars
in the shallows of the rocks, but always following the curves of the
bay, like a bird circling around a lighthouse, it was far in the night
before he at last dragged his boat upon the sand. Then he turned to look
once more at her distant window. He would be away in the morning and he
should never see it again! It was very late, but the blue light seemed
to be still burning unalterably and inflexibly.

But even as he gazed, a change came over it. A shadow seemed to pass
before the blind; the blue shade was lifted; for an instant he could see
the colorless star-like point of the light itself show clearly. It was
over now; she was putting out the lamp. Suddenly he held his breath!
A roseate glow gradually suffused the window like a burning blush; the
curtain was drawn aside, and the red lamp-shade gleamed out surely and
steadily into the darkness.

Transfigured and breathless in the moonlight, John Milton gazed on it.
It seemed to him the dawn of Love!

CHAPER XIII.

The winter rains had come. But so plenteously and persistently, and
with such fateful preparation of circumstance, that the long looked for
blessing presently became a wonder, an anxiety, and at last a slowly
widening terror. Before a month had passed every mountain, stream, and
watercourse, surcharged with the melted snows of the Sierras, had become
a great tributary; every tributary a great river, until, pouring their
great volume into the engorged channels of the American and Sacramento
rivers, they overleaped their banks and became as one vast inland sea.
Even to a country already familiar with broad and striking catastrophe,
the flood was a phenomenal one. For days the sullen overflow lay in the
valley of the Sacramento, enormous, silent, currentless--except where
the surplus waters rolled through Carquinez Straits, San Francisco Bay,
and the Golden Gate, and reappeared as the vanished Sacramento River, in
an outflowing stream of fresh and turbid water fifty miles at sea.

Across the vast inland expanse, brooded over by a leaden sky, leaden
rain fell, dimpling like shot the sluggish pools of the flood; a
cloudy chaos of fallen trees, drifting barns and outhouses, wagons and
agricultural implement