She answered these questions by going there at once. After thoroughly
exploring the grove, and satisfying herself that it contained no other
living human creature, she sat down under one of the largest trees, with
a satisfactory little sigh. Miss Jo loved the madrono. It was a cleanly
tree; no dust ever lay upon its varnished leaves; its immaculate shade
never was known to harbor grub or insect.

She looked up at the rosy arms interlocked and arched above her head.
She looked down at the delicate ferns and cryptogams at her feet.
Something glittered at the root of the tree. She picked it up; it was a
bracelet. She examined it carefully for cipher or inscription; there was
none. She could not resist a natural desire to clasp it on her arm,
and to survey it from that advantageous view-point. This absorbed her
attention for some moments; and when she looked up again she beheld at a
little distance Culpepper Starbottle.

He was standing where he had halted, with instinctive delicacy, on first
discovering her. Indeed, he had even deliberated whether he ought not
to go away without disturbing her. But some fascination held him to the
spot. Wonderful power of humanity! Far beyond jutted an outlying spur of
the Sierra, vast, compact, and silent. Scarcely a hundred yards away, a
league-long chasm dropped its sheer walls of granite a thousand feet. On
every side rose up the serried ranks of pine-trees, in whose close-set
files centuries of storm and change had wrought no breach. Yet all this
seemed to Culpepper to have been planned by an all-wise Providence as
the natural background to the figure of a pretty girl in a yellow dress.

Although Miss Jo had confidently expected to meet Culpepper somewhere
in her ramble, now that he came upon her suddenly, she felt disappointed