neatness showed itself in all the appointments, from the mirrored and
marbled barroom, gilded parlors, and snowy dining-room, to the chintz
and maple furnishing of the bedrooms above. Reddy's taste, too, had
selected the pretty site; his good fortune had afterward discovered
in an adjoining thicket a spring of blandly therapeutic qualities. A
complaisant medical faculty of San Francisco attested to its merits;
a sympathetic press advertised the excellence of the hotel; a
novelty-seeking, fashionable circle--as yet without laws and blindly
imitative--found the new hotel an admirable variation to the vulgar
ordinary "across the bay" excursion, and an accepted excuse for a novel
social dissipation. A number of distinguished people had already visited
it; certain exclusive families had secured the best rooms; there were a
score of pretty women to be seen in its parlors; there had already been
a slight scandal. Nothing seemed wanting to insure its success.

Reddy was passing through the little wood where four months before he
had parted from Kelly Woodridge to learn his fate from her father. He
remembered that interview to which Nelly's wafted kiss had inspired
him. He recalled to-day, as he had many times before, the singular
complacency with which Mr. Woodridge had received his suit, as if it
were a slight and unimportant detail of the business in hand, and how he
had told him that Kelly and her mother were going to the "States" for a
three months' visit, but that after her return, if they were both "still
agreed," he, Woodridge, would make no objection. He remembered the
slight shock which this announcement of Kelly's separation from him
during his probationary labors had given him, and his sudden suspicion
that he had been partly tricked of his preliminary intent to secure her
company to solace him. But he had later satisfied himself that she
knew nothing of her father's intentions at the time, and he was fain to
content himself with a walk through the fields at her side the day she