ering log in a fireplace,
clung an incredibly large striped cat. Like its master, it turned its
head to greet the newcomers. Again Saxon felt the loving benediction
that abided in his face, his eyes, his hands--toward which she
involuntarily dropped her eyes. Again she was impressed by the
gentleness of them. They were hands of love. They were the hands of a
type of man she had never dreamed existed. No one in that merry crowd of
Carmel had prefigured him. They were artists. This was the scholar,
the philosopher. In place of the passion of youth and all youth's mad
revolt, was the benignance of wisdom. Those gentle hands had passed all
the bitter by and plucked only the sweet of life. Dearly as she loved
them, she shuddered to think what some of those Carmelites would be like
when they were as old as he--especially the dramatic critic and the Iron
Man.

"Here are the dear children, Edmund," Mrs. Hale said. "What do you
think! They want to buy the Madrono Ranch. They've been three years
searching for it--I forgot to tell them we had searched ten years for
Trillium Covert. Tell them all about it. Surely Mr. Naismith is still of
a mind to sell!"

They seated themselves in simple massive chairs, and Mrs. Hale took the
tiny rattan beside the big Mission rocker, her slender hand curled like
a tendril in Edmund's. And while Saxon listened to the talk, her eyes
took in the grave rooms lined with books. She began to realize how
a mere structure of wood and stone may express the spirit of him who
conceives and makes it. Those gentle hands had made all this--the very
furniture, she guessed as her eyes roved from desk to chair, from work
table to reading stand beside the bed in the other room, where stood a
green-shaded lamp and orderly piles of magazines and books.

As for the matter of Madrono Ranch, it was easy enough he was saying.
Naismith would sell. Had desired to sell for the past five years, ever
since he had engaged in the enterprise of bottling mineral water at the
springs lower down the valley. It was fortunate that he was the
owner, for about all the rest of the surrounding land was owned by a
Frenchman--an early settler. He would not part with a foot of it. He was
a peasant, with all the peasant's love of the soil, which, in him, had
become an obsession, a disease. He was a land-miser. With no business
capacity, old and opinionated, he was land poor, and it was an open
question which would arrive first, his death o