Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/91

Rh They talked for some moments longer, and then the Colonel arose to go. The subject of the money was not again mentioned between them.

", Puss," observed the Colonel cheerily, as they drove away from Las Flores. "We have had a very busy and profitable morning. If we hurry, we can get home for a late lunch after all. What say?"

"What will Sing Toy say; that's the question."

"True, true. Perhaps we'd better play hookey after all."

"I'll tell you what let's do," cried Daphne, wriggling about in her seat with the splendour of her idea. "Let's go to my house and I'll cook us both some lunch. You've never eaten my cooking. Oh, I would like to show you! Will you? Say yes; say yes!"

"Yes," obeyed the Colonel promptly.

"You dear!" cried Daphne, and threw her arms around him so vigorously that the chestnuts leaped and the Colonel all but lost overboard his stovepipe hat.

They turned off across country and drove down remembered shallow swales and over low flats in the hills. The air sang with insects and birds, was heavy with the odour of lupine. The bright scarves of the wild flowers lay flung across the slopes; the tiny stars of the alfileria peeped from its vivid green; under the live oaks the cattle stood as under benign, spreading arms. In the noon slept the ranges of the Sur in wonderful clarity of outline against a very blue sky, reposing until the evening when they must awaken to throw the magic of sunset changes across their ramparts. Buzzards swung in slow sleepy circles across the sky. Under the light wheels the flowers and grasses bent with a soft crushing sound; and from that crushing came a faint sweet odour different from all the rest. Nobody in the tepid sun-steeped world paid any attention to them—neither the insects, nor the birds, nor the cattle, nor the trees, nor the slumbering ranges; nobody except the sentinel ground squirrels. These scampered, and chirked shrilly, and sat up stiff and straight on their hind legs like so many picket pins.