Satisfied pride was still seething in him when he alighted from the train and entered the waiting carriage. This magnificent girl was worthy of him, worthy of the millions that were really hers. She had everything the others lacked--beauty, charm, talents. Her whole air, that regalness of aspect which sometimes curiously distinguishes the simple women of the West, appealed passionately to his ambition and love of success. She was born to conquer, to be a queen of men. The image of Maud rose beside her, and seemed clumsier and commoner than ever. The father felt a slight movement of distaste and irritation against his second daughter, who had supplanted in his home and in the world’s regard his elder and fairer child. The carriage turned in through a lofty gate and rolled at a slackened pace up a long winding drive. Jacob Shackleton’s Menlo Park estate was one of the showy ones of that gathering place of rich men’s mansions. The road wound for some half mile through a stretch of uncultivated land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some round and compact and so densely leaved that they were as impervious to rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if spellbound in some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees in Doré’s drawings, to be endowed with a grotesque, weird humanness of aspect, as though an imprisoned dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors of life along each convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness marked them all, due to their own richly subdued coloring and the long garlands of silvery moss that hung from their boughs like an eldrich growth of hair. A sudden greenness in the sward and brilliant glimpses of flower-beds pieced in between dark tree-trunks, told of the proximity of the house. It was a massive structure, architecturally ugly, but gaining a sort of majesty from its own ponderous bulk and from the splendor of lawns and trees about it. The last level rays of the sun were now flooding grass and garden, piercing bosky thickets where greens melted into greens, and sleeping on stretches of close-cropped emerald turf. From among the smaller trees the lordly blue pines--that with the oaks were once the only denizens of the long rich valley--soared up, lonely and somber. Their crests, stirred by passing airs, emitted eolian murmurings, infinitely mournful, as if repining for the days when they had ruled alone.