«That's it!» Bert's face beamed. «It's a way she has. She just puts it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don't know why. Maybe she's learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she's learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting sour. The chances are she didn't bat an eye all last night— excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now ordinary things that'd keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don't faze her. She can sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she's in is being bombarded or when the ship she's in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She's a wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her—the English game. She'll go some.»
A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the morning room, where, despite an hour of rag-time song and dancing and chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack, and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and way, come in upon them through the open door.
Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours' exploration of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.
He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his hostess did not appear.
«A white night,» Dick Forrest surmised for his guest's benefit, and went into details additional to Bert's of her constitutional inaptitude for normal sleep. «Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I've seen her go three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of exhaustion. That was when the
A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he was a violinist of note on the Pacific Coast.
«He has conceived a grand passion for Paula,» Ernestine told Graham as they passed out from the dining room.
Graham raised his eyebrows.
«Oh, but she doesn't mind,» Ernestine laughed. «Every man that comes along does the same thing. She's used to it. She has just a charming way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the best out of them in consequence. It's lots of fun to Dick. You'll be doing the same before you're here a week. If you don't, we'll all be surprised mightily. And if you don't, most likely you'll hurt Dick's feelings. He's come to expect it as a matter of course. And when a fond, proud husband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to see his wife not appreciated.»
«Oh, well, if I am expected to, I suppose I must,» Graham sighed. «But just the same I hate to do whatever everybody does just because everybody does it. But if it's the custom—well, it's the custom, that's all. But it's mighty hard on one with so many other nice girls around.»
There was a quizzical light in his long gray eyes that affected Ernestine so profoundly that she gazed into his eyes over long, became conscious of what she was doing, dropped her own eyes away, and flushed.
«Little Leo—the boy poet you remember last night,» she rattled on in a patent attempt to escape from her confusion. «He's madly in love with Paula, too. I've heard Aaron Hancock chaffing him about some sonnet cycle, and it isn't difficult to guess the inspiration. And Terrence—the Irishman, you know—he's mildly in love with her. They can't help it, you see; and can you blame them?»
«She surely deserves it all,» Graham murmured, although vaguely hurt in that the addle-pated, alphabet- obsessed, epicurean anarchist of an Irishman who gloried in being a loafer and a pensioner should even mildly be in love with the Little Lady. «She is most deserving of all men's admiration,» he continued smoothly. «From the little I've seen of her she's quite remarkable and most charming.»
«She's my half-sister,» Ernestine vouchsafed, «although you wouldn't dream a drop of the same blood ran in our veins. She's so different. She's different from all the Destens, from any girl I ever knew— though she isn't exactly a girl. She's thirty-eight, you know—»
«Pussy, pussy,» Graham whispered.
The pretty young blonde looked at him in surprise and bewilderment, taken aback by the apparent irrelevance of his interruption.
«Cat,» he censured in mock reproof.
«Oh!» she cried. «I never meant it that way. You will find we are very frank here. Everybody knows Paula's age. She tells it herself. I'm eighteen—so, there. And now, just for your meanness, how old are you?»
«As old as Dick,» he replied promptly.
«And he's forty,» she laughed triumphantly. «Are you coming swimming? —the water will be dreadfully cold.»
Graham shook his head. «I'm going riding with Dick.»
Her face fell with all the ingenuousness of eighteen.
«Oh,» she protested, «some of his eternal green manures, or hillside terracing, or water-pocketing.»
«But he said something about swimming at five.»
Her face brightened joyously.
«Then we'll meet at the tank. It must be the same party. Paula said swimming at five.»
As they parted under a long arcade, where his way led to the tower room for a change into riding clothes, she stopped suddenly and called:
«Oh, Mr. Graham.»
He turned obediently.
«You really are not compelled to fall in love with Paula, you know. It was just my way of putting it.»
«I shall be very, very careful,» he said solemnly, although there was a twinkle in his eye as he concluded.
Nevertheless, as he went on to his room, he could not but admit to himself that the Paula Forrest charm, or the far fairy tentacles of it, had already reached him and were wrapping around him. He knew, right there, that he would prefer the engagement to ride to have been with her than with his old-time friend, Dick.
As he emerged from the house to the long hitching-rails under the ancient oaks, he looked eagerly for his hostess. Only Dick was there, and the stable-man, although the many saddled horses that stamped in the shade promised possibilities. But Dick and he rode away alone. Dick pointed out her horse, an alert bay thoroughbred, stallion at that, under a small Australian saddle with steel stirrups, and double– reined and single-bitted.
«I don't know her plans,» he said. «She hasn't shown up yet, but at any rate she'll be swimming later. We'll meet her then.»
Graham appreciated and enjoyed the ride, although more than once he found himself glancing at his wrist- watch to ascertain how far away five o'clock might yet be. Lambing time was at hand, and through home field after home field he rode with his host, now one and now the other dismounting to turn over onto its feet rotund and glorious Shropshire and Ramboullet-Merino ewes so hopelessly the product of man's selection as to be unable to get off, of themselves, from their own broad backs, once they were down with their four legs helplessly sky- aspiring.
«I've really worked to make the American Merino,» Dick was saying; «to give it the developed leg, the strong back, the well-sprung rib, and the stamina. The old-country breed lacked the stamina. It was too much hand-reared and manicured.»
«You're doing things, big things,» Graham assured him. «Think of shipping rams to Idaho! That speaks for itself.»
Dick Forrest's eyes were sparkling, as he replied:
«Better than Idaho. Incredible as it may sound, and asking forgiveness for bragging, the great flocks to-day of Michigan and Ohio can trace back to my California-bred Ramboullet rams. Take Australia. Twelve years ago I sold three rams for three hundred each to a visiting squatter. After he took them back and demonstrated them he sold them for as many thousand each and ordered a shipload more from me. Australia will never be the worse for my having been. Down there they say that lucerne, artesian wells, refrigerator ships, and Forrest's rams have tripled the wool and mutton production.»
