She glanced about more appreciatively. The soft rich mysterious beauty of the day and of California symphonised with the flush on her cheeks, the rapt languor of her eyes, the quickening within her.
She spent the greater part of the day in the hills, buying a glass of milk and some bread at a farmhouse. When she reached the redwoods on the long slopes, she tethered her horse, and wandered far into the forest. The very mystery of life brooded in those dim cool aisles, whose silence was undisturbed by the low roar of spring waters, whose feathery green undergrowth was barely flecked by the brilliant sun above the dense arbours high on the grey columns of the forest.
She lay on the edge of the bluff above the creek and watched the salmon moving in lazy and unperturbed possession of their sparkling waters, the darting trout, the wilderness of ferns and lilac and lily down on the water’s edge. A deer climbed down the opposite bank and drank; owls cried to each other in the night of the forest; two hundred feet above her head the squirrels exchanged drowsy remarks; in the warm green twilight of the afternoon the very birds went to sleep.
It was not the first time that Lee had dreamed of Cecil Maundrell in this forest; she doubted if he would seem as naturally encompassed by the beech woods and fells, the ruins and traditions of his English home. Certainly this was as old, and as surely it was a part of her.
They both had unnumbered generations behind them: his were thick with men and events; hers with redwoods, whose aisles were unpeopled, in whose impenetrable depths tradition itself was lost.
She returned home late in the afternoon. Randolph, who had just come from town, was standing on the steps, and ran forward to lift her down.
“My mother was beginning to worry,” he said; “you ought to take a boy with you. If you don’t want a servant, I will stay down and accompany you.”
Lee flicked him lightly with her whip. “Then I wouldn’t go,” she said. “I love to ride about for hours by myself. Fancy if one could never get away from men.”
She spoke airily, but Randolph looked hard at her.
“What has happened?” he demanded. “There is something quite unusual about you.”