It had been a warm morning; an unusual mist, which the sun had not
dissipated, had crept on from the great grain-fields beyond, and hung
around the house charged with a dry, dusty closeness that seemed to be
quite independent of the sun's rays, and more like a heated exhalation
or emanation of the soil itself. In its acrid irritation Rose thought
she could detect the breath of the wheat as on the day she had
plunged into its pale, green shadows. By the afternoon this mist had
disappeared, apparently in the same mysterious manner, but not scattered
by the usual trade-wind, which--another unusual circumstance--that day
was not forthcoming. There was a breathlessness in the air like the
hush of listening expectancy, which filled the young girl with a vague
restlessness, and seemed to even affect a scattered company of crows
in the field beyond the house, which rose suddenly with startled but
aimless wings, and then dropped vacantly among the grain again.

Major Randolph was inspecting a distant part of the ranch, Mrs. Randolph
was presumably engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between
Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly
turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of
eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that
morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the
ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother's eyebrows,
that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness,
but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the
weather. It occurred to her also that the vacuously amiable Adele had
once or twice regarded her with the same precocious, childlike curiosity
and infantine cunning she had once before exhibited. All this did not,
however, abate her admiration for both--perhaps particularly for this