in their
matchless cerulean tints, which, near the end of day, were royal in
their splendour. For a hundred miles they reigned supreme before the
fringe of the endless plains was reached--peak after peak, gorge on
gorge, tier upon tier of beetling walls of rock, disclosing dim
shadowy gullies clothed with greenery and ferns where abounded
cascades of water and dewy springs in romantic and unrivalled
solitude. The sun, surrounded by a gorgeous pageant of flame and
gold, rested his chin on one of the peaks as though well pleased with
the glowing snowless scene that his offices had in part created, and
lingered a moment ere giving it up to the eager night. She sent her
forerunners,--twilight, which paled the wondrous blues, and dusk, that
left the mountains shadowy and indistinct, when the lady of darkness
herself rubbed them right out of the great canvas, and left it no
coloured beauty but the gleam of the far stars overhead and the tiny
man-made lights below, which, showing from the windows of the little
homesteads creeping up the mountain-sides, twinkled like points
between earth and sky.

Miss Grosvenor made no further comment regarding Dawn's probable
inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience
had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and
I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were
disillusioned and she was not.

We knew that the acme of refinement and culture might possibly be
found in the smart set, but that it was a very small island,
surrounded by a very large sea of other styles which spoke nothing so
much as squandered opportunities. We knew girls too superior to dress
themselves without a maid, yet who rolled tipsy to bed after every
champagne orgy; supercilious and much-paragraphed misses educated in
England, finished in Paris, and presented at Court, but who used more
slang than grooms; while an expensive education did not raise their
brothers above ribaldry and other vulgar excesses. Ernest and I knew a
beautiful, honest, intelligent girl when we had the good fortune to
meet her, and had no fears that she could not hold her own in good
sets, let alone in the smarter ones of colonial or any other
fashionable society, where the majority were animated by nothing
higher than an insane and inane pursuit of something to kill time.

Besides, it was wonderful how Dawn suddenly eschewed slang and
conspicuous violation of syntax, as she coul