t her feet.
Something glittered at the root of the tree. She picked it up; it was a
bracelet. She examined it carefully for cipher or inscription; there was
none. She could not resist a natural desire to clasp it on her arm,
and to survey it from that advantageous view-point. This absorbed her
attention for some moments; and when she looked up again she beheld at a
little distance Culpepper Starbottle.

He was standing where he had halted, with instinctive delicacy, on first
discovering her. Indeed, he had even deliberated whether he ought not
to go away without disturbing her. But some fascination held him to the
spot. Wonderful power of humanity! Far beyond jutted an outlying spur of
the Sierra, vast, compact, and silent. Scarcely a hundred yards away, a
league-long chasm dropped its sheer walls of granite a thousand feet. On
every side rose up the serried ranks of pine-trees, in whose close-set
files centuries of storm and change had wrought no breach. Yet all this
seemed to Culpepper to have been planned by an all-wise Providence as
the natural background to the figure of a pretty girl in a yellow dress.

Although Miss Jo had confidently expected to meet Culpepper somewhere
in her ramble, now that he came upon her suddenly, she felt disappointed
and embarrassed. His manner, too, was more than usually grave and
serious; and more than ever seemed to jar upon that audacious levity
which was this giddy girl's power and security in a society where all
feeling was dangerous. As he approached her she rose to her feet, but
almost before she knew it he had taken her hand and drawn her to a seat
beside him. This was not what Miss Jo had expected, but nothing is so
difficult to predicate as the exact preliminaries of a declaration of
love.

What did Culpepper say? Nothing, I fear, that will add anything to
the wisdom of the reader; nothing, I fear, that Miss Jo had not
heard substantially from other lips before. But there was a certain
conviction, fire-speed, and fury in the manner that was deliciously
novel to the young lady. It was certainly something to be courted in
the nineteenth century with all the passion and extravagance of the
sixteenth; it was something to hear, amid the slang of a frontier
society, the language of knight-errantry poured into her ear by this
lantern-jawed, dark-browed descendant of the Cavaliers.

I do not know that there was anything more in it. The facts, however, go
to show that at a certain