The women simply frightened them, as being, even more than the men, demonstrative and excessive in their fine looks, their fine dresses, their extravagant demand for excitement.  In less than a week they found themselves regretting—­not the new villa on the slope of Devil’s Ford, which even in its own bizarre fashion was exceeded by the barbarous ostentation of the villas and private houses around them—­but the double cabin under the trees, which now seemed to them almost aristocratic in its grave simplicity and abstention.  In the mysterious forests of masts that thronged the city’s quays they recalled the straight shafts of the pines on Devil’s slopes, only to miss the sedate repose and infinite calm that used to environ them.  In the feverish, pulsating life of the young metropolis they often stopped oppressed, giddy, and choking; the roar of the streets and thoroughfares was meaningless to them, except to revive strange memories of the deep, unvarying monotone of the evening wind over their humbler roof on the Sierran hillside.  Civic bred and nurtured as they were, the recurrence of these sensations perplexed and alarmed them.

“It seems so perfectly ridiculous,” said Jessie, “for us to feel as out of place here as that Pike County servant girl in Sacramento who had never seen a steamboat before; do you know, I quite had a turn the other day at seeing a man on the Stockton wharf in a red shirt, with a rifle on his shoulder.”

“And you wanted to go and speak to him?” said Christie, with a sad smile.

“No, that’s just it; I felt awfully hurt and injured that he did not come up and speak to me!  I wonder if we got any fever or that sort of thing up there; it makes one quite superstitious.”

Christie did not reply; more than once before she had felt that inexplicable misgiving.  It had sometimes seemed to her that she had never been quite herself since that memorable night when she had slipped out of their sleeping-cabin, and stood alone in the gracious and commanding presence of the woods and hills.  In the solitude of night, with the hum of the great city rising below her—­at times even in theatres or crowded assemblies of men and women—­she forgot herself, and again stood in the weird brilliancy of that moonlight night in mute worship at the foot of that slowly-rising mystic altar of piled terraces, hanging forests, and lifted plateaus that climbed forever to the lonely skies.  Again she felt before her the expanding and opening arms of the protecting woods.  Had they really closed upon her in some pantheistic embrace that made her a part of them?  Had she been baptized in that moonlight as a child of the great forest?  It was easy to believe in the myths of the poets of an idyllic life under those trees, where, free from conventional restrictions, one loved and was loved.  If she, with her own worldly experience, could think of this now, why might not George Kearney have thought? . . .  She stopped, and found herself blushing even in the darkness.  As the thought and blush were the usual sequel of her reflections, it is to be feared that they may have been at times the impelling cause.