She looked anxiously at him.
“Long illnesses are apt to make people thin,” he said, turning away his head.
“Yes, I suppose so, especially—” She too left her sentence unfinished. For a moment she stood looking down, flicking at an adjacent rose-tree with her switch.
“Tell me about the gardening,” he said, seizing on the subject as the one uppermost in his mind. “How do you get your things as far afield as Sonora?”
“I’ll tell you about that later;” she suddenly seemed to shake off her anxieties as a child might. Her clouded face turned on him sparkling with new animation, “I’ll tell you all about that another time. Now—”
He interrupted her:
“But there may not be another time. You know I’ll be leaving soon.”
She looked amazed, quite aghast.
“Leaving?” she exclaimed—“leaving Foleys?”
“Yes, I must be back in San Francisco in a few days. And it takes a day to ride from here to Sacramento.”