During the long summer that followed her first winter at Santa Barbara the little town sank into a semi-torpid state.  Strangers disappeared.  With many of the permanent residents to kill time was the main object of languid effort.  To Madge the season brought varied opportunity.  The old professor gave her much of his time.  While others slept she read and studied.  The heat, tempered by the vast Pacific, was never great, and the air had a vitality that proved a constant aid to her controlling motive.  In the morning she rode or took some form of skilled exercise in which she knew Graydon to be proficient, and she rarely missed her ocean bath.  Such health was she acquiring that it was becoming a joy in itself.  As with all earnest, constant natures, however, her supreme motive grew stronger with time.

In August she received tidings from the East that caused much solicitude and depression.  Graydon had returned for a brief visit, and had joined Mr. and Mrs. Muir at a seaside inn.  “A Miss Wildmere is staying here also,” her sister wrote, “and, somewhat to Mr. Muir’s disapproval, Graydon seems not only well acquainted with her, but unusually friendly.  Mr. Muir says that if she is like her father she is a ‘speculator’; and from the attention she receives and the way she receives it one would think he was right.  Graydon, however, seems to be her favorite, and if he could remain long enough it is not hard to see what might happen.  But she is a great belle and a coquette too, I should imagine, and she has a large enough following to turn any girl’s head.  I don’t wonder at it either, for she is the most lovely creature I ever saw, and yet she doesn’t make a pleasant impression on me.  The men are just wild about her.  Mr. Muir looks askance at Graydon’s devotion, and mutters ‘speculator’ when Miss Wildmere’s name is mentioned.  Graydon returns to Europe next week.  He inquires often after you, and his questions make me feel that I don’t know as much about you and what you are doing as I should.  You write often, but somehow you seem remote in more senses than one.  I suppose, however, you are reading as usual, and just floating along down stream with time.  Well, no matter, dear.  You write that you are better and stronger, and have no more of your old dreadful colds.  You must spend next summer with us, even if you have to go back to Santa Barbara in the winter.”

Neither the shortness of his visit nor the fascinations of Miss Wildmere prevented Graydon from writing Madge a cordial note full of regret that he should not see her.  “You have indeed,” he wrote, “vanished like a ghost, and become but a haunting memory.  It is a year and a half since I have seen you, and I did not succeed in beguiling you into a correspondence.  Like the good Indians, you have followed the setting sun into some region as vague and distant as the ’happy hunting-ground.’  Mary says that you will come East next summer.  The idea!  Is there anything of you to come that