Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/204

192 "I dare say they 'll be very nice when we get to know them. Everybody 's strange at first. Good night, father."

She went in and closed the door. The aloofness of her manner had never been more marked. It seemed to place the colonel in the position of a stranger to whom she preserved an attitude of polite reticence. Feeling shrunk and chilled, he crept away to his own room.

So the new life began. Everything was very strange, and the weather was very hot. The colonel, who had not for fifty years known a warmer climate than San Francisco, wilted in the furnace-like airs of the interior city. The first burning week exhausted him as a serious illness might have done. Viola, who had never seen her father ill, was frightened, and sent for a doctor. The doctor came, asked questions, and looked wise. He said the colonel's heart was weak, and that he seemed in a very debilitated condition. A trip to the seaside would do him good; cooler weather would brace him up.

When the man had gone there was a silence between the father and daughter. Through the drawn blinds the golden cracks of intruding sunshine cut the dimness that Viola had made by closing all the shutters in a futile attempt to keep the room cool.

Presently she said, in a voice that she tried to make cheerful: