It was true;he had been talking with her an hour--pleasantly,intelligently,and yet with a consciousness of an indefinite satisfaction beyond all this.It must have been surprise at her transformation,or his previous misconception of her character.
He had been watching her features and wondering why he had ever thought them expressionless.There was also the pleasant suggestion--common to humanity in such instances--that he himself was in some way responsible for the change;that it was some awakened sympathy to his own nature that had breathed into this cold and faultless statue the warmth of life.In an odd flash of recollection he remembered how,five years ago,when Rice had suggested to her that she was "hard to please,"she had replied that she "didn't know,but that she was waiting to see."It did not occur to him to wonder why she had not awakened then,or if this awakening had anything to do with her own volition.It was not probable that they would meet again after to-day,or if they did,that she would not relapse into her former self and fail to impress him as she had now.But--here she was--a paragon of feminine promptitude--already standing in the doorway,accurately gloved and booted,and wearing a demure gray hat that modestly crowned her decorously elegant figure.
They crossed the plaza side by side,in the still garish sunlight that seemed to mock the scant shade of the youthful eucalyptus trees,and presently fell in with the stream of people going in their direction.The former daughters of Sidon,the Billingses,the Peterses,and Wingates,were there bourgeoning and expanding in the glare of their new prosperity,with silk and gold;there were newer faces still,and pretty ones,--for Tasajara as a "Cow County"had attracted settlers with large families,--and there were already the contrasting types of East and West.Many turned to look after the tall figure of the daughter of the Founder of Tasajara,--a spectacle lately rare to the town;a few glanced at her companion,equally noticeable as a stranger.Thanks,however,to some judicious preliminary advertising from the hotel clerk,Peters,and Daniel Harcourt himself,by the time Grant and Miss Harcourt had reached the Hall his name and fame were already known,and speculation had already begun whether this new stroke of Harcourt's shrewdness might not unite Clementina to a renowned and profitable partner.
The Hall was in one of the further and newly opened suburbs,and its side and rear windows gave immediately upon the outlying and illimitable plain of Tasajara.It was a tasteful and fair-seeming structure of wood,surprisingly and surpassingly new.In fact that was its one dominant feature;nowhere else had youth and freshness ever shown itself as unconquerable and all-conquering.The spice of virgin woods and trackless forests still rose from its pine floors,and breathed from its outer shell of cedar that still oozed its sap,and redwood that still dropped its life-blood.Nowhere else were the plastered walls and ceilings as white and dazzling in their unstained purity,or as redolent of the outlying quarry in their clear cool breath of lime and stone.Even the turpentine of fresh and spotless paint added to this sense of wholesome germination,and as the clear and brilliant Californian sunshine swept through the open windows west and east,suffusing the whole palpitating structure with its searching and resistless radiance,the very air seemed filled with the aroma of creation.
The fresh colors of the young Republic,the bright blazonry of the newest State,the coat-of-arms of the infant County of Tasajara--(a vignette of sunset-tules cloven by the steam of an advancing train)--hanging from the walls,were all a part of this invincible juvenescence.Even the newest silks,ribbons and prints of the latest holiday fashions made their first virgin appearance in the new building as if to consecrate it,until it was stirred by the rustle of youth,as with the sound and movement of budding spring.
