easily flouted, did not draw him, and his ingenious relations flounced
disgustedly away.

But Leonidas was not spared any further allusion to the fair stranger;
for the fact of her having spoken to him was duly reported at home, and
at dinner his reticence was again sorely attacked. "Just like her, in
spite of all her airs and graces, to hang out along the fence like any
ordinary hired girl, jabberin' with anybody that went along the road,"
said his mother incisively. He knew that she didn't like her new
neighbors, so this did not surprise nor greatly pain him. Neither did
the prosaic facts that were now first made plain to him. His divinity
was a Mrs. Burroughs, whose husband was conducting a series of mining
operations, and prospecting with a gang of men on the Casket Ridge.
As his duty required his continual presence there, Mrs. Burroughs was
forced to forego the civilized pleasures of San Francisco for a frontier
life, for which she was ill fitted, and in which she had no interest.
All this was a vague irrelevance to Leonidas, who knew her only as a
goddess in white who had been familiar to him, and kind, and to whom he
was tied by the delicious joy of having a secret in common, and having
done her a special favor. Healthy youth clings to its own impressions,
let reason, experience, and even facts argue ever to the contrary.

So he kept her secret and his intact, and was rewarded a few days
afterwards by a distant view of her walking in the garden, with a man
whom he recognized as her husband. It is needless to say that, without
any extraneous thought, the man suffered in Leonidas's estimation by his
propinquity to the goddess, and that he deemed him vastly inferior.

It was a still greater reward to his fidelity that she seized an
opportunity when her husband's head was turned to wave her hand to him.