r thoughts had spoken for themselves, and they
had stopped wonderingly to listen. They talked at first vaguely to this
discreet audience of space and darkness, and then, growing bolder, spoke
to each other and of themselves. Invested by the infinite gravity of
nature, they had no fear of human ridicule to restrain their youthful
conceit or the extravagance of their unimportant confessions.
They talked of their tastes, of their habits, of their friends
and acquaintances. They settled some points of doctrine, duty, and
etiquette, with the sweet seriousness of youth and its all-powerful
convictions. The listening vines would have recognized no flirtation or
love-making in their animated but important confidences; yet when Mrs.
Bradley reappeared to warn the invalid that it was time to seek his
couch, they both coughed slightly in the nervous consciousness of some
unaccustomed quality in their voices, and a sense of interruption far
beyond their own or the innocent intruder's ken.

"Well?" said Mrs. Bradley, in the sitting-room as Mainwaring's steps
retreated down the passage to his room.

"Well," said Louise with a slight yawn, leaning her pretty shoulders
languidly against the door-post, as she shaded her moonlight-accustomed
eyes from the vulgar brilliancy of Mrs. Bradley's bedroom candle.
"Well--oh, he talked a great deal about 'his people' as he called them,
and I talked about us. He's very nice. You know in some things he's
really like a boy."

"He looks much better."

"Yes; but he is far from strong yet."

Meantime, Mainwaring had no other confidant of his impressions than his
own thoughts. Mingled with his exaltation, which was the more seductive
that it had no well-defined foundation for existing, and implied
no future responsibility, was a recurrence of his uneasiness at the
impending visit of Richardson the next day. Strangely enough, it had
increased under the stimulus of the evening. Just as he was really
getting on with the family, he felt sure that this visitor would import
some foreign element into their familiarity, as Minty had done. It was
possible they would not like him: now he remembered there was
really something ostentatiously British and insular about this
Richardson--something they would likely resent. Why couldn't this fellow
have come later--or even before? Before what? But here he fell asleep,
and almost instantly slipped from this veranda in the Sierras, six
thousand miles away, to an anc