e the green sward that surrounds it the brown
hills rise, the grass scorched by the sun.

Kate yielded herself to the almost absurd luxury of the place with ease
and complacency. She took kindly to the great verandas. She adapted
herself to the elaborate and ill-assorted meals. She bathed in the
marvellous pool, warm with the heat of eternal fires in mid-earth. This
pool was covered with a picturesque Moorish structure, and at one end
a cascade tumbled, over which the sun, coming through colored windows,
made a mimic prism in the white spray. The life was not unendurable. The
major was seldom with her, being obliged to go about his business;
and Kate amused herself by driving over the hills, by watching the
inhabitants, by wondering about the lives in the great, pretentious,
unhomelike houses with their treeless yards and their closed shutters.
The sunlight, white as the glare on Arabian sands, penetrated
everywhere. It seemed to fairly scorch the eye-balls.

"Oh, we're West, now," Kate said, exultantly. "I've seen a thousand
types. But yet--not quite THE type--not the impersonation of simplicity
and daring that I was looking for."

The major didn't know quite what she was talking about. But he
acquiesced. All he cared about was to see her grow stronger; and that
she was doing every day. She was growing amazingly lovely, too,-at least
the major thought so. Every one looked at her; but that was, perhaps,
because she was such a sylph of a woman. Beside the stalwart major, she
looked like a fairy princess.

One day she suddenly realized the fact that she had had a companion on
the veranda for several mornings. Of course, there were a great many
persons--invalids, largely--sitting about, but one of them had been
obtruding himself persistently into her consciousness. It was not that
he was rude; it was only that he was thinking about her. A person with
a temperament like Kate's could not long be oblivious to a thing like
that; and she furtively observed the offender with that genius for
psychological perception which was at once her greatest danger and her
charm.

The man was dressed with a childish attempt at display. His shirt-front
was decorated with a diamond, and his cuff-buttons were of onyx with
diamond settings. His clothes were expensive and perceptibly new, and
he often changed his costumes, but with a noticeable disregard for
propriety. He was very conscious of his silk hat, and frequently wiped
it with a ha