They halted many times on their way to the garden. It was in an opposite direction from the Springs; but here as there the road had been partly cut out on the mountain-side—partly filled in—so that it formed a terrace overhanging the dense forest-growth in the ravine below, while on the banks and mountain-tops above grew pines and madrones, the manzanite shrub and treacherous gloss of the poison-oak making the whole look like a carefully planted park. The "garden" was a little mountain valley, taking its name from an enclosed patch, where nothing was grown, but where the neglected fields were kept fresh and green by the little rivulet flowing from the cold spring at the foot of an immense sycamore. Farther on were groups of young oaks, and under these were benches; but Jenny preferred sitting in the shade of the pines on the clean, sweet grass. The birds, never molested here, hovered fearlessly about them, singing and chirping, the blue and yellow butterflies keeping time to the music.
For quite a while Mr. Brodie had been watching Jenny's lithe figure darting hither and thither, trying to take the butterflies prisoners under her hat; her eyes sparkled, and she shouted merrily whenever she had secured a prize, which, after a moment's triumph, she always set free again.
"Come and sit down," called Mr. Brodie to her, "or you will hurt your hand again, and all my three weeks' doctoring will be thrown away."
"It hurts me now," said Jenny, ruefully, "for I struck it against that tree."
She held up the offending hand, and he inspected it narrowly, looking up suddenly into her eyes, as though to read in them an answer to something he had just thought. But it was hard to read anything there, though Jenny had the sweetest eyes in the world—laughing and sad by turns, and of warm liquid light. What their color was, it was hard to determine. They had been called black, hazel, gray; never blue. Her smile was as unfathomable as her eyes; and you could read nothing of her life, her history, her character, from either brow or lip. Her hand alone—it was the right one—as it rested on the sward beside her, might have told to one better versed in such reading than Ben Brodie, how, like Theodore Storm's "Elizabeth," it had, "through many a sleepless night, been resting on a sore, sick heart."
He raised the hand tenderly, not understanding its secret, and asked, stroking it as we do a child's, "What was my partner saying to you as I came up a while ago?"
"He wants you to go to San Francisco, away from here. Would you go and leave me here alone, when you know how lonesome I should be without you?"
She heard his low, nervous laugh, as he moved uneasily, and held the hand tighter; but when she looked up into his face, expecting an answer, it came in his usual abrupt, or, as Jenny said, "jerky" style.
"No, of course I wouldn't go. I'll stay as long as you want me to. I—I—like you—pretty well."
Jenny's paling cheek blazed up crimson, and she looked fairly aghast as she repeated mechanically, "'Like you pretty well.' Thank you. Like me, indeed!" She had drawn away her hand, like a pettish child, and she muttered, a wicked smile breaking over her face, "I don't believe the man could love any one if he tried. But I'll find out;" and she turned again to where he sat, disconsolate at the loss of her hand.