Sarella was not pleased at this.
"Surprise him! Why should it surprise him that anyone should marry me?"
"There is no reason. Only, he does not imagine that there is someone. If there is someone, he would suppose you had not been willing to marry him by your coming here instead."
("Is she stupid or cautious?" Sarella asked herself. "She will say nothing.")
Mariquita was neither cautious nor stupid. She was only ignorant of Sarella's purpose, and by no means awake to her father's.
"It is terribly hot out here," Sarella grumbled, "and there is such a glare. I shall go in and study."
CHAPTER X.
Mariquita did not go in too. She did not find it hot, nor did the glare trouble her. The air was full of life and vigor, and she had no sense of lassitude. There was, indeed, a breeze from the far-off Rockies, and to her it seemed cool enough, though the sun was so nearly directly overhead that her figure cast only a very stunted shadow of herself. In the long grass the breeze made a slight rustle, but there was no other sound.
Mariquita did not want to be indoors; outside, here on the tilted prairie, she was alone and not lonely. The tilt of the vast space around her showed chiefly in this—that eastward the horizon was visibly lower than at the western rim of the prairie. The prairie was not really flat; between her and both horizons there lay undulations, those between her and the western rising into mesas, which, with a haze so light as only to tell in the great distance, hid the distant barrier of the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills even were beyond the frontiers of this State.