“One moment, please,” she interrupted, and turned quickly towards the door.  She opened it and looked out.  “I thought they were calling me,—­and—­I—­I—­must go now, Mr. Brant.  And without finishing my business either, or saying half I had intended to say.  But wait”—­she put her hand to her head in a pretty perplexity, “it’s a moonlight night, and I’ll propose after dinner a stroll in the gardens, and you can manage to walk a little with me.”  She stopped again, returned, said, “It was very kind of you to think of me at Sacramento,” held out her hand, allowed it to remain for an instant, cool but acquiescent, in his warmer grasp, and with the same odd youthfulness of movement and gesture slipped out of the door.

An hour later she was at the head of her dinner table, serene, beautiful, and calm, in her elegant mourning, provokingly inaccessible in the sweet deliberation of her widowed years; Padre Esteban was at her side with a local magnate, who had known Peyton and his wife, while Donna Rosita and a pair of liquid-tongued, childlike senoritas were near Clarence and Sanderson.  To the priest Mrs. Peyton spoke admiringly of the changes in the rancho and the restoration of the Mission Chapel, and together they had commended Clarence from the level of their superior passionless reserve and years.  Clarence felt hopelessly young and hopelessly lonely; the naive prattle of the young girls beside him appeared infantine.  In his abstraction, he heard Mrs. Peyton allude to the beauty of the night, and propose that after coffee and chocolate the ladies should put on their wraps and go with her to the old garden.  Clarence raised his eyes; she was not looking at him, but there was a slight consciousness in her face that was not there before, and the faintest color in her cheek, still lingering, no doubt, from the excitement of conversation.

It was a cool, tranquil, dewless night when they at last straggled out, mere black and white patches in the colorless moonlight.  The brilliancy of the flower-hued landscape was subdued under its passive, pale austerity; even the gray and gold of the second terrace seemed dulled and confused.  At any other time Clarence might have lingered over this strange effect, but his eyes followed only a tall figure, in a long striped burnous, that moved gracefully beside the soutaned priest.  As he approached, it turned towards him.

“Ah! here you are.  I just told Father Esteban that you talked of leaving to-morrow, and that he would have to excuse me a few moments while you showed me what you had done to the old garden.”

She moved beside him, and, with a hesitation that was not unlike a more youthful timidity, slipped her hand through his arm.  It was for the first time, and, without thinking, he pressed it impulsively to his side.  I have already intimated that Clarence’s reserve was at times qualified by singular directness.

A few steps carried them out of hearing; a few more, and they seemed alone in the world.  The long adobe wall glanced away emptily beside them, and was lost; the black shadows of the knotted pear-trees were beneath their feet.  They began to walk with the slight affectation of treading the shadows as if they were patterns on a carpet.  Clarence was voiceless, and yet he seemed to be moving beside a spirit that must be first addressed.