The brief mountain twilight was giving way now to the radiance of the rising moon.  He endeavored to fix his thoughts upon his partners who were to meet him at Hymettus after these long years of separation.

Hymettus!  He recalled now the odd coincidence that he had mischievously used as a gag to his questioning fellow traveler; but now he had really come from a villa near Athens to find his old house thus classically rechristened after it, and thought of it with a gravity he had not felt before.  He wondered who had named it.  There was no suggestion of the soft, sensuous elegance of the land he had left in those great heroics of nature before him.  Those enormous trees were no woods for fauns or dryads; they had their own godlike majesty of bulk and height, and as he at last climbed the summit and saw the dark-helmeted head of Black Spur before him, and beyond it the pallid, spiritual cloud of the Sierras, he did not think of Olympus.  Yet for a moment he was startled, as he turned to the right, by the Doric-columned facade of a temple painted by the moonbeams and framed in an opening of the dark woods before him.  It was not until he had reached it that he saw that it was the new wooden post-office of Heavy Tree Hill.

And now the buildings of the new settlement began to faintly appear.  But the obscurity of the shadow and the equally disturbing unreality of the moonlight confused him in his attempts to recognize the old landmarks.  A broad and well-kept winding road had taken the place of the old steep, but direct trail to his cabin.  He had walked for some moments in uncertainty, when a sudden sweep of the road brought the full crest of the hill above and before him, crowned with a tiara of lights, overtopping a long base of flashing windows.  That was all that was left of Heavy Tree Hill.  The old foreground of buckeye and odorous ceanothus was gone.  Even the great grove of pines behind it had vanished.

There was already a stir of life in the road, and he could see figures moving slowly along a kind of sterile, formal terrace spread with a few dreary marble vases and plaster statues which had replaced the natural slope and the great quartz buttresses of outcrop that supported it.  Presently he entered a gate, and soon found himself in the carriage drive leading to the hotel veranda.  A number of fair promenaders were facing the keen mountain night wind in wraps and furs.  Demorest had replaced his coat, but his boots were red with dust, and as he ascended the steps he could see that he was eyed with some superciliousness by the guests and with considerable suspicion by the servants.  One of the latter was approaching him with an insolent smile when a figure darted from the vestibule, and, brushing the waiter aside, seized Demorest’s two hands in his and held him at arm’s length.

“Demorest, old man!”

“Stacy, old chap!”

“But where’s your team?  I’ve had all the spare hostlers and hall-boys listening for you at the gate.  And where’s Barker?  When he found you’d given the dead-cut to the railroad—­his railroad, you know—­he loped over to Boomville after you.”