“And now the man puts on gloves and a tall hat to come here on Sundays, and the woman won’t call until you’ve called first,” retorted Kate; “perhaps you call that improvement.  The fact is, Josephine,” continued the young girl, folding her arms demurely, “we might as well admit it at once—­these people don’t like us.”

“That’s impossible!” said Mrs. Hale, with sublime simplicity.  “You don’t like them, you mean.”

“I like them better than you do, Josie, and that’s the reason why I feel it and you don’t.”  She checked herself, and after a pause resumed in a lighter tone:  “No; I sha’n’t go to the station; I’ll commune with nature to-day, and won’t ‘take any humanity in mine, thank you,’ as Bill the driver says.  Adios.”

“I wish Kate would not use that dreadful slang, even in jest,” said Mrs. Scott, in her rocking-chair at the French window, when Josephine reentered the parlor as her sister walked briskly away.  “I am afraid she is being infected by the people at the station.  She ought to have a change.”

“I was just thinking,” said Josephine, looking abstractedly at her mother, “that I would try to get John to take her to San Francisco this winter.  The Careys are expected, you know; she might visit them.”

“I’m afraid, if she stays here much longer, she won’t care to see them at all.  She seems to care for nothing now that she ever liked before,” returned the old lady ominously.

Meantime the subject of these criticisms was carrying away her own reflections tightly buttoned up in her short jacket.  She had driven back her dog Spot—­another one of her disillusions, who, giving way to his lower nature, had once killed a sheep—­as she did not wish her Jacques-like contemplation of any wounded deer to be inconsistently interrupted by a fresh outrage from her companion.  The air was really very chilly, and for the first time in her mountain experience the direct rays of the sun seemed to be shorn of their power.  This compelled her to walk more briskly than she was conscious of, for in less than an hour she came suddenly and breathlessly upon the mouth of the canyon, or natural gateway to Eagle’s Court.

To her always a profound spectacle of mountain magnificence, it seemed to-day almost terrible in its cold, strong grandeur.  The narrowing pass was choked for a moment between two gigantic buttresses of granite, approaching each other so closely at their towering summits that trees growing in opposite clefts of the rock intermingled their branches and pointed the soaring Gothic arch of a stupendous gateway.  She raised her eyes with a quickly beating heart.  She knew that the interlacing trees above her were as large as those she had just quitted; she knew also that the point where they met was only half-way up the cliff, for she had once gazed down upon them, dwindled to shrubs from the airy summit; she knew that their shaken cones fell a thousand feet perpendicularly, or bounded like shot from the scarred walls they bombarded.  She remembered that one of these pines, dislodged from its high foundations, had once dropped like a portcullis in the archway, blocking the pass, and was only carried afterwards by assault of steel and fire.  Bending her head mechanically, she ran swiftly through the shadowy passage, and halted only at the beginning of the ascent on the other side.