orders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from the
Chilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which had
guarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamen
profaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter;
the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering trees
above, and the brook below was a mass of trampled mud.

The engineer's visits to the spring gave him no pleasure, in those days. He
felt that he was the inevitable instrument of its desecration; but over the
hill, just in sight from the spring, carpenters were putting a new piazza
round a cottage that stood remote from the camp, where a spur of the hills
descended steeply towards the valley. Arnold took a great interest in this
cottage. He was frequently to be seen there in the evening, tramping up and
down the new piazza, and offering to the moon, that looked in through the
boughs of a live-oak at the end of the gallery, the incense of his lonely
cigar. Sometimes he would take the key of the front door from his pocket,
enter the silent house, and wander from one room to another, like a
restless but not unhappy ghost; the moonlight, touching his face, showed it
strangely stirred and softened. His was no melancholy madness.

Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when the
schoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to see
him, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage,
and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a few
minutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road,
where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago.

"I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone," he said. "The men on
the road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners.
I hope you are not going to the spring!"