"Is that by way of another introduction?" asked Judge Tiffany. His eyes looked at her severely, but his beard showed that he was smiling gently again. Half his joy in a welded marriage lay in his appreciation of her humors, as though one should laugh at himself. "Oh, there's no doubt that _he's_ a gentleman. He is less loud, somehow, than Mr. Chester, though he hasn't his charm. It seems there is the most wonderful boy friendship between them." "Where did you get all this insight into the social life of our employees?" asked Judge Tiffany; and then, "Mattie, you've been exposing yourself to the night air again." "Over at their camp last evening," said Mrs. Tiffany. "Well, and isn't it my business to look after--after that side of the ranch?" she added. The Judge had dropped the book now; his senses were alert to the game which never grew old to him--"Mattie-baiting" he had named it. "Mattie," he said, "with a pretty and marriageable, dowered and maiden niece on your hands, a new era is opening in your life of passionate self-sacrifice. It used to be orphan children and neglected wives of farm hands. Now it is presentable but neglected bachelors. Your darling match for Eleanor, I suppose, would be some young soul snatched from evil courses, pruned, trimmed, and delivered at the altar with 'Made by Mattie Tiffany' branded on his wings. Spare, O spare your innocent niece!" "Edward, I never thought of it in that light!" cried Mrs. Tiffany; and she bent herself to furious crocheting. After a time, and when the Judge had resumed his book, she looked up and added: "It might be worse, though, than a young man who had made it all himself." Judge Tiffany burst into laughter. Then, seeing her bend closer over her pink yarns, he grew grave, reached for the hand which held the needles, and kissed it. That was her reward of childless matrimony, as the appreciation of her humors was his. * * * * * While they sat thus, in one of their comfortable hours, the guests were come. The Morses appeared first. He was a pleasant, hollow-chested little man; his delicacy of lung gave him his excuse for playing gentleman farmer. She, half-Spanish, carried bulk for the family and carried it well. The Andalusian showed in her coy yet open air, in her small, broad hand and foot, in a languorous liquidity of eye. Their son, a well-behaved and pretty youth of twelve, and their daughter, two years older, rode behind them on the back seat. The daughter bore one of those mosaic names with which the mixed race has sprinkled California--Teresa del Vinal Morse. A pretty, delicate tea-rose thing, she stood at an age of divided appreciations. In the informal society of the Santa Lucia colony, she was listening half the time to her elders, taking a shadowy interest in their sayings and opinions; for the rest, she was turning on Theodore, that childish brother, an illuminated understanding.