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“He’s as likely to lose his hundred thousand to-morrow, while his manners will remain,” said Mrs. Randolph. “I’ve no faith in these sudden California fortunes!”

“You’re wrong as regards Mallory, for he’s as careful as he is lucky. He don’t throw money away for appearance sake, or he’d have a rich home for that daughter. He could afford it.”

Mrs. Randolph was silent. “She is his only daughter, I believe,” she continued presently.

“Yes–he has no other kith or kin,” returned the major.

“She seems to be very much impressed by Emile,” said Mrs. Randolph.

Major Randolph faced his wife quickly.

“In the name of all that’s ridiculous, my dear, you are not already thinking of”–he gasped.

“I should be very loth to give MY sanction to anything of the kind, knowing the difference of her birth, education, and religion,–although the latter I believe she would readily change,” said Mrs. Randolph, severely. “But when you speak of MY already thinking of ‘such things,’ do you suppose that your friend, Mr. Mallory, didn’t consider all that when he sent that girl here?”

“Never,” said the major, vehemently, “and if it entered his head now, by Jove, he’d take her away to-morrow–always supposing I didn’t anticipate him by sending her off myself.”

Mrs. Randolph uttered her mirthless laugh. “And you suppose the girl would go? Really, major, you don’t seem to understand this boasted liberty of your own countrywoman. What does she care for her father’s control? Why, she’d make him do just what SHE wanted. But,” she added with an expression of dignity, “perhaps we had better not discuss this until we know something of Emile’s feelings in the matter. That is the only question that concerns us.” With this she swept out of the room, leaving the major at first speechless with honest indignation, and then after the fashion of all guileless natures, a little uneasy and suspicious of his own guilelessness. For a day or two after, he found himself, not without a sensation of meanness, watching Rose when in Emile’s presence, but he could distinguish nothing more than the frank satisfaction she showed equally to the others. Yet he found himself regretting even that, so subtle was the contagion of his wife’s suspicions.

CHAPTER III

It had been a warm morning; an unusual mist, which the sun had not dissipated, had crept on from the great grain-fields beyond, and hung around the house charged with a dry, dusty closeness that seemed to be quite independent of the sun’s rays, and more like a heated exhalation or emanation of the soil itself. In its acrid irritation Rose thought she could detect the breath of the wheat as on the day she had plunged into its pale, green shadows. By the afternoon this mist had disappeared, apparently in the same mysterious manner, but not scattered by the usual trade-wind, which–another unusual circumstance–that day was not forthcoming. There was a breathlessness in the air like the hush of listening expectancy, which filled the young girl with a vague restlessness, and seemed to even affect a scattered company of crows in the field beyond the house, which rose suddenly with startled but aimless wings, and then dropped vacantly among the grain again.

Major Randolph was inspecting a distant part of the ranch, Mrs. Randolph was presumably engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother’s eyebrows, that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness, but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the weather. It occurred to her also that the vacuously amiable Adele had once or twice regarded her with the same precocious, childlike curiosity and infantine cunning she had once before exhibited. All this did not, however, abate her admiration for both–perhaps particularly for this picturesquely gentlemanly young fellow, with his gentle audacities of compliment, his caressing attentions, and his unfailing and equal address. And when, discovering that she had mislaid her fan for the fifth time that morning, he started up with equal and undiminished fire to go again and fetch it, the look of grateful pleasure and pleading perplexity in her pretty eyes might have turned a less conceited brain than his.