there had been no repetition of their secret interviews. Neither had he,
nor she as far as he could judge, noticed the omission. He had been more
than usually kind, gentle, and protecting in his manner towards her,
with little reference, however, to any response from her, yet he was
vaguely conscious of some change in his feelings. He attributed it, when
he thought of it at all, to the exciting experiences through which he
had passed; to some sentiment of responsibility to his dead friend; and
to another secret preoccupation that was always in his mind. He believed
it would pass in time. Yet he felt a certain satisfaction that she was
no longer able to trouble him, except, of course, when she pained Mrs.
Peyton, and then he was half conscious of taking the old attitude of
the dead husband in mediating between them. Yet so great was his
inexperience that he believed, with pathetic simplicity of perception,
that all this was due to the slow maturing of his love for her, and
that he was still able to make her happy. But this was something to
be thought of later. Just now Providence seemed to have offered him a
vocation and a purpose that his idle adolescence had never known. He did
not dream that his capacity for patience was only the slow wasting of
his love.
Meantime that more wonderful change and recreation of the Californian
landscape, so familiar, yet always so young, had come to the rancho. The
league-long terrace that had yellowed, whitened, and wasted for half a
year beneath a staring, monotonous sky, now under sailing clouds, flying
and broken shafts of light, and sharply defined lines of rain, had taken
a faint hue of resurrection. The dust that had muffled the roads and
byways, and choked the low oaks that fringed the sunken canada, had
long since been laid. The warm, moist breath of the southwest trades had
softened the hard, dry lines of the landscape, and restored its color as
of a picture over which a damp sponge had been passed. The broad expanse
of plateau before the casa glistened and grew dark. The hidden woods of
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