A great white bank, writhing and lifting, rolling and bending, came across the ocean slowly, with majestic stealth, hiding the swinging waves on which it rode so lightly, shrouding the rocks, enfolding the men and women, wreathing the cypresses, rushing onward to the pines.

“We must go,” said Dona Eustaquia, rising.  “There is danger to stay.  The lungs, the throat, my children.  Look at the poor old cypresses.”

The fog was puffing through the gaunt arms, festooning the rigid hands.  It hung over the green heads, it coiled about the gray trunks.  The stern defeated trees looked like the phantoms of themselves, a long silent battalion of petrified ghosts.  Even Benicia’s gay spirit was oppressed, and during the long ride homeward through the pine woods she had little to say to her equally silent companion.

IX

Dona Eustaquia seldom gave balls, but once a week she opened her salas to the more intellectual people of the town.  A few Americans were ever attendant; General Vallejo often came from Sonoma to hear the latest American and Mexican news in her house; Castro rarely had been absent; Alvarado, in the days of his supremacy, could always be found there, and she was the first woman upon whom Pio Pico called when he deigned to visit Monterey.  A few young people came to sit in a corner with Benicia, but they had little to say.

The night after the picnic some fifteen or twenty people were gathered about Dona Eustaquia in the large sala on the right of the hall; a few others were glancing over the Mexican papers in the little sala on the left.  The room was ablaze with many candles standing, above the heads of the guests, in twisted silver candelabra, the white walls reflecting their light.  The floor was bare, the furniture of stiff mahogany and horse-hair, but no visitor to that quaint ugly room ever thought of looking beyond the brilliant face of Dona Eustaquia, the lovely eyes of her daughter, the intelligence and animation of the people she gathered about her.  As a rule Dona Modeste Castro’s proud head and strange beauty had been one of the living pictures of that historical sala, but she was not there to-night.

As Captain Brotherton and Lieutenant Russell entered, Dona Eustaquia was waging war against Mr. Larkin.

“And what hast thou to say to that proclamation of thy little American hero, thy Commodore”—­she gave the word a satirical roll, impossible to transcribe—­“who is heir to a conquest without blood, who struts into history as the Commander of the United States Squadron of the Pacific, holding a few hundred helpless Californians in subjection?  O warlike name of Sloat!  O heroic name of Stockton!  O immortal Fremont, prince of strategists and tacticians, your country must be proud of you!  Your newspapers will glorify you!  Sometime, perhaps, you will have a little history bound in red morocco all to yourselves; whilst