Directly Mary Wiley left her at the hushed little hotel she wrote a note to him--four lines--and sent it by messenger, and sat down to wait in the lobby. A grave bell boy tried twice to show her to her room, but she told him she wished to wait there for the answer to the letter she had just sent. She was joyfully sure what form the answer would take; Dean Wolcott would come himself. She could picture him, crossing to her from the front door to the chair where she sat; he would look as he had looked that golden day, when they came together on Aleck’s bridge. The door opened and closed nineteen times by count. She would know her messenger the instant she saw him; he was a rather small boy, copiously freckled, and he wore thick spectacles. He returned in exactly twenty-seven minutes by the office clock and handed Ginger’s note back to her, unopened. There was only a caretaker at the Wolcott residence, he reported: she had told him that the entire Wolcott family had gone to Florida. CHAPTER VIII MONTEREY; _Monterey_.... Dean Wolcott liked the look and the sound of the word. Directly the train deposited him there he liked the place itself. His one impression of California was of dust and glare, of dry and dazzling heat: this was a land of gray and gentle summer--June-veiled. Some one sent him down to the old wharf for his luncheon and he ate zestfully of “Pop Ernst’s” piping hot chowder and meltingly tender abalone and then set out for his afternoon of exploring. He liked the old customhouse; he liked the “Sherman Rose,” and the fishing boats in the bay; he liked the flavor of tradition in everything; he hadn’t supposed there was as much background as this in all of California. He drove out to the Mission at Carmel and had his tea at a little house close by, and went back to Monterey and did the seventeen-mile drive, and he kept stopping the car and getting out to go close to the gnarled, embattled trees on the cliffs. He thought they looked as if Arthur Rackham had drawn them; they satisfied him deeply. He stayed the night at Del Monte and liked the old hotel and the precise and formal gardens; he was amazed to find how heartily he was liking everything he saw, for he had not undertaken his western pilgrimage in the spirit of a joy ride. He had undertaken it grimly, purposefully, resentfully, but it began to look as if he should actually enjoy it. He felt his spirits mounting as he climbed into the front seat of the Big Sur stage next morning and found himself the only passenger. The driver told him that he didn’t carry much beside the mail until around the Fourth of July; then people began to swarm down to Pfeiffer’s Resort, and the deer hunters came in with the open season, the first of August. “Won’t be many folks where _you’ll_ be, though,” he said, grinning. “If you’re the lonesome kind, you’re out of luck.”