“Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train.  Not going far,” he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested a definite mission.

“We hate to lose you!” called Mrs. Smith.

“I hate to be lost!” Jack called back; “but that is just my natural luck.”

“I suppose you’ve got your work cut out for you back East, same’s everybody else, somewhere or other, ’less they’re millionaires, who all stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles.”

“Yes, I have work—­lots of it,” said Jack, ruefully.  He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky.  The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue.

“Why care?  Why care?” His Majesty was asking.  “Why not leave all the problems of earthly existence to your lungs?  Why not lie back and look on at things and breathe my air?  That is enough to keep your whole being in tune with the Infinite.”

It was his afternoon mood.  At sunset he would have another.  Then he would be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over.

Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped when he came from the post-office with Mary.  Left bare of its surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which had been added later, would have appeared a barracks.  But Jasper Ewold had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward of his pioneerdom.

When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal bougainvillea vines.  So he hitched his way up the steps.  Feeling that it was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell.  There was none.  He rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall.

“David, you seem to be the only one at home,” he remarked, for there had been no answer to his raps; “and you are too busy getting a bead on Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer.”

Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he followed the path to the rear.  His head knocked off the dead petals of a rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet.  Rounding the corner of the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival, and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from a garden of roses.  There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance.  He would trust to finding his own way.

When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line with the bottom of the V of Galeria.