It was with a curious recognition of this latter fact that Judge Peyton watched his wife crossing the patio or courtyard with her arm around the neck of her adopted daughter “Suzette.”  A sudden memory crossed his mind of the first day that he had seen them together,—­the day that he had brought the child and her boy-companion—­two estrays from an emigrant train on the plains—­to his wife in camp.  Certainly Mrs. Peyton was stouter and stronger fibred; the wonderful Californian climate had materialized her figure, as it had their Eastern fruits and flowers, but it was stranger that “Susy”—­the child of homelier frontier blood and parentage, whose wholesome peasant plumpness had at first attracted them—­should have grown thinner and more graceful, and even seemed to have gained the delicacy his wife had lost.  Six years had imperceptibly wrought this change; it had never struck him before so forcibly as on this day of Susy’s return from the convent school at Santa Clara for the holidays.

The woman and child had reached the broad veranda which, on one side of the patio, replaced the old Spanish corridor.  It was the single modern innovation that Peyton had allowed himself when he had broken the quadrangular symmetry of the old house with a wooden “annexe” or addition beyond the walls.  It made a pleasant lounging-place, shadowed from the hot midday sun by sloping roofs and awnings, and sheltered from the boisterous afternoon trade winds by the opposite side of the court.  But Susy did not seem inclined to linger there long that morning, in spite of Mrs. Peyton’s evident desire for a maternal tete-a-tete.  The nervous preoccupation and capricious ennui of an indulged child showed in her pretty but discontented face, and knit her curved eyebrows, and Peyton saw a look of pain pass over his wife’s face as the young girl suddenly and half-laughingly broke away and fluttered off towards the old garden.

Mrs. Peyton looked up and caught her husband’s eye.

“I am afraid Susy finds it more dull here every time she returns,” she said, with an apologetic smile.  “I am glad she has invited one of her school friends to come for a visit to-morrow.  You know, yourself, John,” she added, with a slight partisan attitude, “that the lonely old house and wild plain are not particularly lively for young people, however much they may suit your ways.”

“It certainly must be dull if she can’t stand it for three weeks in the year,” said her husband dryly.  “But we really cannot open the San Francisco house for her summer vacation, nor can we move from the rancho to a more fashionable locality.  Besides, it will do her good to run wild here.  I can remember when she wasn’t so fastidious.  In fact, I was thinking just now how changed she was from the day when we picked her up”—­