"I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft, contented little sigh.
And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him.
Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all.
The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs. Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his shoulder.
"I want to see your daughter, the young girl,—the one that walked to Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman.
"M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if M'lissy's about?"
Her husband nodded backward.
"She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll"—
The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand.
"May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone."