When he passed into the
dressing-room beyond, it was not his own face he saw in the glass,
but hers. It was with a start, as if he had heard HER voice, that
he found upon his dressing-table a small vase containing a flower
for his coat, with the penciled words on a card in a school-girl's
hand, "From Yerba, with thanks for staying." It must have been
placed there by a servant while he was musing at the window.
Half a dozen people were already in the drawing-room when Paul
descended. It appeared that Mr. Woods had invited certain of his
neighbors--among them a Judge Baker and his wife, and Don Caesar
Briones, of the adjacent Rancho of Los Pajaros, and his sister, the
Dona Anna. Milly and Yerba had not yet appeared. Don Caesar, a
young man of a toreador build, roundly bland in face and murky in
eye, seemed to notice their absence, and kept his glances towards
the door, while Paul engaged in conversation with Dona Anna--if
that word could convey an impression of a conventionality which
that good-humored young lady converted into an animated flirtation
at the second sentence with a single glance and two shakes of her
fan. And then Milly fluttered in--a vision of school-girl
freshness and white tulle, and a moment later--with a pause of
expectation--a tall, graceful figure, that at first Paul scarcely
recognized.
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