Catalina felt her companion give an ecstatic shiver, but omitted to pull her back as she leaned recklessly over the rail. Her own spirit seemed to swirl in that glorious tide. She threw back her head, staring at the black velvet skies of Spain with their golden music, then turned slowly and regarded the old white walls and gardens about her, the palms and the riot of flowers and vine, invoking the image of Cæsar himself prowling in the night to the lattice of inviting loveliness in a mantilla. She wished she had draped her own about her head, and wondered if Over shared her vision. But he was merely marvelling at her beauty, and wondering if he should ever get as far as California. He would like to see her in that patio she had described to him, with its old mission fountain, its gigantic date-palms through whose bending branches the sun never penetrated, the big-leaved banana-tree heavy with yellow fruit, the scarlet hammock, the mountains rising just behind the old house. She had described it to him only that afternoon, and he had received a vivid impression of it all, and of the deep verandas and the cool, austere rooms within. It had struck him as a delightful retreat after the strife of the world, and he wondered if under that eternally blue sky, in that Southern land of warmth and color, where the very air caressed, he could not forget even the broad demesne of his ancestors, a demesne that would never be his, but where he was always a welcome guest. She had told him that her estate—her “ranch”—went right down to the sea; it was, in fact, a wide valley, closed with the Pacific at one end, and a range of mountains immediately behind the house. It had seemed to him the ideal existence as she described it, a perfect balance of the intellectual and the out-door life, of boundless freedom and unvarying health; and all in an atmosphere of perfect peace. He had envied her at the moment, but had philosophically concluded that in the long run a man’s club most nearly filled the bill. He fancied, however, that he should correspond with her, and one of these days pay her a visit. “Best remember that this is the land of passion, not of idle flirtation, Miss Lydia,” he said, warningly, as the music ceased for a moment. “What is play to you might be death to that Johnny down there.” For answer Lydia plucked a rose and dropped it into a lithe brown hand that shot up to meet it. IX