There was some criticism nearer home.
"What do you think of it, Miss Marsh?" said the president politely to that active young secretary, as he stood before it in the hall.
The young woman adjusted her eye-glasses over her aquiline nose.
"As an idea or a woman, sir?"
"As a woman, madam," said the president, letting his brown eyes slip for a moment from Miss Marsh's corn-colored crest over her straight but scant figure down to her smart slippers.
"Well, sir, she could wear YOUR boots, and there isn't a corset in Sacramento would go round her."
"Thank you!" he returned gravely, and moved away. For a moment a wild idea of securing possession of the figure some dark night, and, in company with his fellow-conspirators, of trying those beautiful clothes upon her, passed through his mind, but he dismissed it. And then occurred a strange incident, which startled even his cool, American sanity.
It was a beautiful moonlight night, and he was returning to a bedroom at the hotel which he temporarily occupied during the painting of his house. It was quite late, he having spent the evening with a San Francisco friend after a business conference which assured him of the remarkable prosperity of Excelsior. It was therefore with some human exaltation that he looked around the sleeping settlement which had sprung up under the magic wand of their good fortune. The full moon had idealized their youthful designs with something of their own youthful coloring, graciously softening the garish freshness of paint and plaster, hiding with discreet obscurity the disrupted banks and broken woods at the beginning and end of their broad avenues, paving the rough river terrace with tessellated shadows, and even touching the rapid stream which was the source of their wealth with a Pactolean glitter.
The windows of the hotel before him, darkened within, flashed in the moonbeams like the casements of Aladdin's palace. Mingled with his ambition, to-night, were some softer fancies, rarely indulged by him in his forecast of the future of Excelsior--a dream of some fair partner in his life, after this task was accomplished, yet always of some one moving in a larger world than his youth had known. Rousing the half sleeping porter, he found, however, only the spectral gold-seeker in the vestibule,--the rays of his solitary candle falling upon her divining-rod with a quaint persistency that seemed to point to the stairs he was ascending.