the little canon, and then, with long strides, took his way over the hills
in an opposite direction.

It was the middle of July when this little episode of the spring occurred.
The summer had reached its climax. The dust did not grow perceptibly
deeper, nor the fields browner, during the long brazen weeks that followed;
one only wearied of it all, more and more.

So thought Miss Newell, at least. It was her second summer in California,
and the phenomenon of the dry season was not so impressive on its
repetition. She had been surprised to observe how very brief had been the
charm of strangeness, in her experience of life in a new country. She began
to wonder if a girl, born and brought up among the hills of Connecticut,
could have the seeds of _ennui_ subtly distributed through her frame, to
reach a sudden development in the heat of a Californian summer. She longed
for the rains to begin, that in their violence and the sound of the wind
she might gain a sense of life in action by which to eke out her dull and
expressionless days. She was, as Nicky Dyer had said, "a good un to 'old
'er tongue," and therein lay her greatest strength as well as her greatest
danger.

Miss Newell boarded at Captain Dyer's. The prosperous ex-mining captain
was a good deal nearer to the primitive type than any man Miss Newell had
ever sat at table with in her life before, but she had a thorough respect
for him, and she felt that the time might come when she could enjoy
him--as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossip
than her neighbors; and there were no children,--only one grandchild,
the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, but
everything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell's
homesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across the