Millicent thought him decidedly the most attractive of their hosts; but her quick intuition had already told her that Graham felt little cordiality towards him, and she spoke chiefly to Hartley, the rather insignificant "beauty man" of the camp. From him she learned that for several years the trio of friends had passed the summer months in camping out at some spot not far distant from the railroad, which carried them every morning to San Francisco, and which brought them back as early in the afternoon as might be. Their one henchman (of course a Chinaman) was left in charge of the camp during the day, and performed the household work necessary to so primitive a _ménage_. Not far distant from the camp, the stream whose course they had followed spread out into a wide, deep pool, affording an opportunity for a refreshing plunge, with which the three friends were wont to begin the proceedings of the day. A breakfast eaten at the tent door was followed by a walk to the station, half a mile distant, when they bade good-by to their sylvan home. Four o’clock, or at latest five, saw them on their way from the city; and an hour or two of angling in the cool stream, wherein swam delicious trout, or a tramp through the woods with a gun, brought them to the dinner hour. Just at this point in Hartley’s chronicle of their daily life, Ah Lam, who had been brought to assist the one servant of the camp in his preparations, announced that dinner was served. Millicent never learned how the evenings were passed in camp, for there was a general move towards the dining-room, another triumph of sylvan architecture. A few paces distant from the green parlor, but hidden from it by the thick intervening bushes, was a great fig-tree with wide-spreading branches laden with delicious purple fruit. At the foot of the tree stood a table laid with plates, knives and forks, and other appurtenances of civilized life. Millicent gave a little cry of delight at the prettily decorated board, which was wreathed with a garland of green leaves and covered with bright flowers. Barbara, who had been reading Dumas with that intense delight to which the first acquaintance with French romance gives rise, said that the banquet surpassed the one spread by Joseph Bassano for the Dauphine of France in the old Chateau. Millicent found herself at the table between Graham and the good-natured Irishman, O’Neil. Her lover seemed to her handsomer to-day among this band of his contemporaries than ever before; and she looked at him with her whole soul in her eyes, forgetting all in the world beside or beyond him. O’Neil, who was the wit of the camp, told funny stories at which every one laughed; but when Graham spoke, the men all listened, like soldiers waiting the words of their superior. Before they had come to the table, the artist had twined a girdle for Millicent’s slender waist of some feathery green creeper, a spray of which she had wreathed about her head.