Here Judge Peyton seemed to have realized his idea of a perfect climate, and a retirement, half-studious, half-active, with something of the seignioralty of the old slaveholder that he had been.

Here, too, he had seen the hope of restoring his wife's health--for which he had undertaken the overland emigration--more than fulfilled in Mrs.Peyton's improved physical condition, albeit at the expense, perhaps, of some of the languorous graces of ailing American wifehood.
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.