"He cannot bear yet to hear her spoken of," said Francisca, following him with moist eyes.
"I was—ahem!—very fond of my mother. She died when I was a boy," said the Professor.
"But ours was with us only a little year ago. She sat where you sit, and looked at us with her beautiful soft eyes.
"And you—you had not even a sister." Francisca looked at him as if she would like to make up that deficiency of tenderness—perhaps to stroke his head, as she did Francisco's.
There was abundant leisure for the Professor's studies, for the long, gorgeous wonderland of summer was upon them, and most people were at Santa Catalina, or in the high Sierras, taking an exchange of paradises.
The days rounded through their delicious sequence of perfumed dawns alive with birds, and middays of still air and shadowed lawns, to the infinite twilights and great moons.
In the evenings—the evenings of Southern California—they sat out under the vines, watching these enormous yellow and orange moons, and Francisca sang Californian songs.
Thus the days passed; punctuated by a talk with the Padre, a ride, a stroll, or some playful share in the labor of irrigating the oranges—the one form of labor Francisco ever seemed engaged in; but these he irrigated perpetually.
The Professor missed nothing; he desired nothing. The intoxication of living in close touch with the sun and air, and Earth in her summer mood, has never been half told. Every fibre of his being rejoiced in that long summer.
The little ranch of five acres—all that remained of five hundred—was large enough to hold his content. We do not know that the Garden of Eden was larger. He wrote hopefully to the Faculty concerning that Chair, and with laudable moderation to his principal correspondent in the East: "California has a charm impossible to analyze. I wish you were here." And then he paused, pondered, and carefully erased the last sentence, but not so perfectly but that Miss Dysart by dint of holding it up to the window-pane deciphered it, and sat biting her pencil gravely a space thereafter.