once--these people don't like us."
"That's impossible!" said Mrs. Hale, with sublime simplicity. "You don't
like them, you mean."
"I like them better than you do, Josie, and that's the reason why I feel
it and YOU don't." She checked herself, and after a pause resumed in a
lighter tone: "No; I sha'n't go to the station; I'll commune with nature
to-day, and won't 'take any humanity in mine, thank you,' as Bill the
driver says. Adios."
"I wish Kate would not use that dreadful slang, even in jest," said
Mrs. Scott, in her rocking-chair at the French window, when Josephine
reentered the parlor as her sister walked briskly away. "I am afraid
she is being infected by the people at the station. She ought to have a
change."
"I was just thinking," said Josephine, looking abstractedly at her
mother, "that I would try to get John to take her to San Francisco this
winter. The Careys are expected, you know; she might visit them."
"I'm afraid, if she stays here much longer, she won't care to see them
at all. She seems to care for nothing now that she ever liked before,"
returned the old lady ominously.
Meantime the subject of these criticisms was carrying away her own
reflections tightly buttoned up in her short jacket. She had driven back
her dog Spot--another one of her disillusions, who, giving way to
his lower nature, had once killed a sheep--as she did not wish her
Jacques-like contemplation of any wounded deer to be inconsistently
interrupted by a fresh outrage from her companion. The air was really
very chilly, and for the first time in her mountain experience the
direct rays of the sun seemed to be shorn of their power. This compelled
her to walk more briskly than she was conscious of, for in less than an
hour she came suddenly and breathlessly upon the mouth of the canyon, or
natural gateway to Eagle's Court.
To her always a profound spectacle of mountain magnificence, it seemed
to-day almost terrible in its cold, strong grandeur. The narrowing pass
was choked for a moment between two gigantic buttresses of granite,
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