Later that evening she was unreasonably annoyed to find that her brother, Mr. John Shipley, had taken advantage of the absence of Grant to pay marked attention to Clementina, and had even prevailed upon that imperious goddess to accompany him after dinner on a moonlight stroll upon the veranda and terraces of Los Pajaros. Nevertheless she seemed to recover her spirits enough to talk volubly of the beautiful scenery she had discovered in her late perilous abandonment in the wilds of the Coast Range; to aver her intention to visit it again; to speak of it in a severely practical way as offering a far better site for the cottages of the young married couples just beginning life than the outskirts of towns or the bleak sand hills of San Francisco; and thence by graceful degrees into a dissertation upon popular fallacies in regard to hasty marriages, and the mistaken idea of some parents in not accepting the inevitable and making the best of it. She still found time to enter into an appreciative and exhaustive criticism upon the literature and journalistic enterprise of the Pacific Coast with the proprietor of the “Pioneer,” and to cause that gentleman to declare that whatever people might say about rich and fashionable Eastern women, that Mrs. Ashwood's head was about as level as it was pretty.
The next morning found her more thoughtful and subdued, and when her brother came upon her sitting on the veranda, while the party were preparing to return, she was reading a newspaper slip that she had taken from her porte-monnaie, with a face that was partly shadowed.
“What have you struck there, Conny?” said her brother gayly. “It looks too serious for a recipe.”
“Something I should like you to read some time, Jack,” she said, lifting her lashes with a slight timidity, “if you would take the trouble. I really wonder how it would impress you.”
“Pass it over,” said Jack Shipley good-humoredly, with his cigar between his lips. “I'll take it now.”
She handed him the slip and turned partly away; he took it, glanced at it sideways, turned it over, and suddenly his look grew concentrated, and he took the cigar from his lips.
“Well,” she said playfully, turning to him again. “What do you think of it?”
“Think of it?” he said with a rising color. “I think it's infamous! Who did it?”
She stared at him, then glanced quickly at the slip. “What are you reading?” she said.
“This, of course,” he said impatiently. “What you gave me.” But he was pointing to THE OTHER SIDE of the newspaper slip.