The young girl put down her laughing face, and her father swept a kiss from it with his gray mustache. Then the two young creatures went out into the lighted streets, laughing and clinging to each other in the sweet, selfish happiness that is the preface to so large a part of the world's misery. They came back presently with their purchase, a somewhat obtrusively ornate piece of jewelry, which Annette pronounced semi-barbarous; being, she said, a compromise between her own severely classical taste and that of Sterling, which latter, she assured her father, was entirely savage. She fastened the trinket at her throat, where it acquired a sudden and hitherto unsuspected elegance in the eyes of her lover, and then unclasped it, and held it at arm's-length in front of her before she laid it in its pink cotton receptacle. "I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft, contented little sigh. And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him. Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all. The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs. Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his shoulder. "I want to see your daughter, the young girl,--the one that walked to Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman. "M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if M'lissy's about?" Her husband nodded backward. "She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll"-- The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand. "May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone." Lysander bent his tall figure and moved along the rows of orange-trees, until he caught a glimpse of Melissa's blue drapery. "She's right down there," he said, pointing between the smooth trunks with his hoe. "It's rough walkin',--I've just been a-throwin' up a furrow fer the irrigatin'; but I guess you c'n make it." She went down the shaded aisle between the orange-trees, Mrs. Sproul looking after her dubiously, as a person guilty of a serious breach of decorum in asking to see any one alone. Melissa leaned on her hoe, and watched her approach with listless amazement. She took in every detail of her daintily clad loveliness,--the graceful sway of her drapery as she walked, the cluster of roses in her belt, and the wide hat with its little forest of curling plumes.