“But it’s hard to see them working so. In summer they’re up and out at six. It doesn’t seem right to me--their father’s daughters. Their grandmother--Beau’s mother--had six house-slaves for her own private use, and I, before my father’s death, had a French governess.” A step on the path prevented him from replying. Rosamund came around the corner of the house, her face flushed, a hoe in her hand, which he now saw to be earthy. She had an anxious air. “Mother, are you tired, dear?” she said, mounting the steps. Then turning to the visitor: “Mother goes in before the sun sets. It gets cool so suddenly. Just the moment the edge of the sun gets down behind the hill, the night comes up, and it’s bad for her to breathe that air.” The Colonel assured her he was just about to take his leave. The invalid made no demand for him to stay. Sitting huddled among her shawls she looked wan and shrunken. He felt that the calm interest of her attitude toward him had now, from fatigue, turned suddenly into indifference. He faltered some words of farewell to her, his hand out. Hers, feeling in his warm, strong grasp like a bundle of twigs, was extended and then limply withdrawn. “Good-by,” she said, turning to follow her daughter’s movements with a waiting, dependent eye, “won’t you come again before you go?” He murmured an assent from the top steps, but he would leave in a day or two at the longest. “The girls like seeing you so much;” now she looked at him with some animation. “And they have so little pleasure.” “Why, mother,” said Rosamund in half-laughing protest, “that sounds as if Colonel Parrish was a sort of circus, just here to amuse us.” The Colonel was nearly at the bottom of the steps. With some last conventional sentences of farewell, he raised his hat and turned toward mother and daughter for a final glance. They were smiling at Rosamund’s words, both looking at him to return his bow with perfunctory politeness. When he turned from them he could hear their voices, low and full of a close and different form of interest, speaking of the adjustment of the invalid’s shawls, the window by which her chair should be placed. He was half-way down the path to the gate when a sound of suppressed singing caught his ear. Turning in its direction he saw coming down through a narrow path in the chaparral a fine red and white cow, and following it, June Allen. She was singing in a crooning, absent-minded way, at intervals flicking the flanks of the cow with a long alder branch she carried, stripped of all its leaves save two at the top. As she approached him she stopped singing, struck the cow with the branch, and began in a thoughtful way to talk to herself.