The explanations, apologies, and not overwise conversation that ensued need not be indicated here.  It would seem, however, that Miss Mary had already established some acquaintance with this ex-drunkard.  Enough that he was soon accepted as one of the party; that the children, with that quick intelligence which Providence gives the helpless, recognized a friend, and played with his blond beard and long silken mustache, and took other liberties—­as the helpless are apt to do.  And when he had built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other mysteries of woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds.  At the close of two such foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the feet of the schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face as she sat upon the sloping hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in very much the same attitude as he had lain when first they met.  Nor was the similitude greatly forced.  The weakness of an easy, sensuous nature, that had found a dreamy exaltation in liquor, it is to be feared was now finding ah equal intoxication in love.

I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this himself.  I know that he longed to be doing something—­slaying a grizzly, scalping a savage, or sacrificing himself in some way for the sake of this sallow-faced, gray-eyed schoolmistress.  As I should like to present him in an heroic attitude, I stay my hand with great difficulty at this moment, being only withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction that it does not usually occur at such times.  And I trust that my fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not Adolphus, who rescues, will forgive the omission.

So they sat there undisturbed—­the woodpeckers chattering overhead and the voices of the children coming pleasantly from the hollow below.  What they said matters little.  What they thought—­which might have been interesting—­did not transpire.  The woodpeckers only learned how Miss Mary was an orphan; how she left her uncle’s house to come to California for the sake of health and independence; how Sandy was an orphan too; how he came to California for excitement; how he had lived a wild life, and how he was trying to reform; and other details, which, from a woodpecker’s viewpoint, undoubtedly must have seemed stupid and a waste of time.  But even in such trifles was the afternoon spent; and when the children were again gathered, and Sandy, with a delicacy which the schoolmistress well understood, took leave of them quietly at the outskirts of the settlement, it had seemed the shortest day of her weary life.