He began to dress slowly, at times almost forgetting himself in a new kind of pleasant apathy, which he attributed to the odor of the flowers, and the softer hush of twilight that had come on with the dying away of the trade winds, and the restful spice of the bay-trees near his window.
He presently found himself not so much thinking of Yerba as of SEEING her.

A picture of her in the summer-house caressing her cheek with the roses seemed to stand out from the shadows of the blank wall opposite him.

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.