blew through
the folds of her flannel blouse, with her brown hair half-loosed beneath
her slouched felt hat, she seemed to Dick a more beautiful and womanly
figure than the stiff buckramed simulation of man's angularity and
precision he had seen in the parks. Perhaps one day she detected this
consciousness too plainly in his persistent eyes. Up to that moment
she had only watched the glittering stretches of yellow grain, in which
occasional wind-shorn evergreen oaks stood mid-leg deep like cattle in
water, the distant silhouette of the Sierras against the steely blue, or
perhaps the frankly happy face of the good-looking young fellow at her
side. But it seemed to her now that an intruder had entered the field--a
stranger before whom she was impelled to suddenly fly--half-laughingly,
half-affrightedly--the anxious Dick following wonderingly at her
mustang's heels, until she reached the gates of the hacienda, where she
fell into a gravity and seriousness that made him wonder still more. He
did not dream that his guileless cousin had discovered, with a woman's
instinct, a mysterious invader who sought to share their guileless
companionship, only to absorb it entirely, and that its name was--love!

The next day she was so greatly preoccupied with her household duties
that she could not ride with him. Dick felt unaccountably lost. Perhaps
this check to their daily intercourse was no less accelerating to his
feelings than the vague motive that induced Cecily to withhold herself.
He moped in the corridor; he rode out alone, bullying his mustang in
proportion as he missed his cousin's gentle companionship, and circling
aimlessly, but still unconsciously, around the hacienda as a centre of
attraction. The sun at last was sinking to the accompaniment of a
rising wind, which seemed to blow and scatter its broad rays over the
shimmering plain until every slight protuberance was burnished
into startling brightness; the shadows of the short green oaks grew
disproportionally long, and all seemed to point to the white-walled
casa. Suddenly he started and instantly reined up.

The figure of a young girl, which he had not before noticed, was slowly
moving down the half-shadowed lane made by the two walls of the garden
and the corral. Cecily! Perhaps she had come out to meet him. He spurred
forward; but, as he came nearer, he saw that the figure and its attire
were surely not hers. He reined up again abruptly, mortified at his
disappoint