The Little Lady of the Big House

over me lately. I feel it imperative to be up and away. The spring fret, I suppose; the Red Gods and their medicine. And if only Dick didn't insist on working his head off and getting tied down with projects! Do you know, in all the years of our marriage, the only really serious rival I have ever had has been this ranch. He's pretty faithful, and the ranch is his first love. He had it all planned and started before he ever met me or knew I existed.»

«Here, let us try this together,» Graham said abruptly, placing the song on the rack before her.

«Oh, but it's the 'Gypsy Trail,'» she protested. «It will only make my mood worse.» And she hummed:

«'Follow the Romany patteran

West to the sinking sun,

Till the junk sails lift through the homeless drift,

And the East and the West are one.'

«What is the Romany patteran?» she broke off to ask. «I've always thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world—a sort of philological excursion.»

«In a way the patteran is speech,» he answered. «But it always says one thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to Gypsy lover.» And he hummed:

«'Back to the road again, again,

Out of a clear sea track;

Follow the cross of the Gypsy trail,

Over the world and back.'»

She nodded comprehension, looked for a moment with troubled eyes down the long room to the card-players, caught herself in her momentary absentness, and said quickly:

«Heaven knows there's a lot of Gypsy in some of us. I have more than full share. In spite of his bucolic proclivities, Dick is a born Gypsy. And from what he has told of you, you are hopelessly one.»

«After all, the white man is the real Gypsy, the king Gypsy,» Graham propounded. «He has wandered wider, wilder, and with less equipment, than any Gypsy. The Gypsy has followed in his trails, but never made trail for him.—Come; let us try it.»

And as they sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he looked down at her and wondered— wondered at her—at himself. This was no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof– tree. Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the years he was just getting acquainted with himself. This was enchantment, madness. He should tear himself away at once. He had known enchantments and madnesses before, and had torn himself away. Had he softened with the years? he questioned himself. Or was this a profounder madness than he had experienced? This meant the violation of dear things—things so dear, so jealously cherished and guarded in his secret life, that never yet had they suffered violation.

And still he did not tear himself away. He stood there beside her, looking down on her brown crown of hair glinting gold and bronze and bewitchingly curling into tendrils above her ears, singing a song that was fire to him— that must be fire to her, she being what she was and feeling what she had already, in flashes, half-unwittingly, hinted to him.

She is a witch, and her voice is not the least of her witchery, he thought, as her voice, so richly a woman's voice, so essentially her voice in contradistinction to all women's voices in the world, sang and throbbed in his ear. And he knew, beyond shade of doubt, that she felt some touch of this madness that afflicted him; that she sensed, as he sensed, that the man and the woman were met.

They thrilled together as they sang, and the thought and the sure knowledge of it added fuel to his own madness till his voice warmed unconsciously to the daring of the last lines, as, voices and thrills blending, they sang:

«'The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky,

The deer to the wholesome wold,

And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid

As it was in the days of old—

The heart of a man to the heart of a maid,

Light of my tents be fleet,

Morning waits at the end of the world,

And the world is all at our feet.'»

He looked for her to look up as the last notes died away, but she remained quiet a moment, her eyes bent on the keys. And then the face that was turned to his was the face of the Little Lady of the Big House, the mouth smiling mischievously, the eyes filled with roguery, as she said:

«Let us go and devil Dick—he's losing. I've never seen him lose his temper at cards, but he gets ridiculously blue after a long siege of losing.

«And he does love gambling,» she continued, as she led the way to the tables. «It's one of his modes of relaxing. It does him good. About once or twice a year, if it's a good poker game, he'll sit in all night to it and play to the blue sky if they take off the limit.»

CHAPTER XVIII

Almost immediately after the singing of the «Gypsy Trail,» Paula emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for hours of the piano from the distant music room. But Graham, patterning after Dick, devoted his mornings to work, so that he rarely encountered Paula before lunch.

She made announcement that her spell of insomnia was over and that she was ripe for all gaieties and excursions Dick had to offer her. Further, she threatened, in case Dick grudged these personal diversions, to fill the house with guests and teach him what liveliness was. It was at this time that her Aunt Martha—Mrs. Tully— returned for a several days' visit, and that Paula resumed the driving of Duddy and Fuddy in the high, one-seated Stude-baker trap. Duddy and Fuddy were spirited trotters, but Mrs. Tully, despite her elderliness and avoirdupois, was without timidity when Paula held the reins.

As Mrs. Tully told Graham: «And that is a concession I make to no woman save Paula. She is the only woman I can trust myself to with horses. She has the horse-way about her. When she was a child she was wild over horses. It's a wonder she didn't become a circus rider.»

More, much more, Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula's father, Mrs. Tully could never say enough. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways—ways that to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with equal facility to lose them, in the great gold adventure of Forty-nine. Himself of old New England stock, he had had for great grandfather a Frenchman—a trifle of flotsam from a mid– ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.

«And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops out,» Mrs. Tully assured Graham. «Philip was that Frenchman in his generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same inheritance in her generation. Though Lute and Ernestine are her half– sisters, no one would imagine one drop of the common blood was shared. That's why Paula, instead of going circus-riding, drifted inevitably to France. It was that old original Desten that drew her over.»

And of the adventure in France, Graham learned much. Philip Desten's luck had been to die when the wheel