Yet so great was his inexperience that he believed, with pathetic simplicity of perception, that all this was due to the slow maturing of his love for her, and that he was still able to make her happy.

But this was something to be thought of later.

Just now Providence seemed to have offered him a vocation and a purpose that his idle adolescence had never known.

He did not dream that his capacity for patience was only the slow wasting of his love.
Meantime that more wonderful change and recreation of the Californian landscape, so familiar, yet always so young, had come to the rancho.

The league-long terrace that had yellowed, whitened, and wasted for half a year beneath a staring, monotonous sky, now under sailing clouds, flying and broken shafts of light, and sharply defined lines of rain, had taken a faint hue of resurrection.