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Updated: June 9, 2025
Courtland's hurried departure no one seemed quite able to perceive. The general idea that had prevailed at The Mooring on the subject of Mr. Courtland was that he would remain at the house after all the other guests Miss Ayrton only excepted had left. During Monday several were to return to town, and the remainder on Tuesday, including Miss Ayrton.
Courtland's remarks upon Federal and State interests, the proper education of young girls, and the management of the family, were eminently wise and practical. On the northerly shore of San Francisco Bay a line of bluffs terminates in a promontory, at whose base, formed by the crumbling debris of the cliff above, there is a narrow stretch of beach, salt meadow, and scrub oak.
Gila's voice sounded as if she were almost there herself. She flung along by his side with a vindictive little click of her high-heeled boots and a prance of her whole elaborate little person that showed she was fairly bristling with wrath. But Courtland's voice was sad with disappointment. "Then you didn't feel it, after all! I was hoping you did." "Feel what?" she asked, sharply.
Her spirited face with its dark eyes and lashes, its setting of blue-black hair, was fascinating in its exquisite modeling. She looked like a proud young cameo standing for her portrait. But her words shot through Courtland's heart like icy swords dividing his soul from his body.
Meantime Gila awaited Courtland's coming, attired in a most startling costume of blue velvet and ermine, with high laced white kid boots, and a hat that resembled a fresh, white setting-hen, tied down to her pert little face with a veil whose large-meshed surface was broken by a single design, a large black butterfly anchored just across her dainty little nose.
He would have sworn to it that Courtland's friendship with Gila had not progressed further than a mere first stage of friendship. He admitted that Gila had an influence over his friend, but that it had really gone heart-deep seemed impossible. Courtland was a man of too much force, even young as he was, and too much maturity of thought, to be permanently entangled with a girl like Gila.
He didn't happen to tell YO' anything about it did he, co'nnle?" she added with a grave mouth, but an indescribable twinkle in her eyes. Courtland's face darkened. "He did and he further told me, Miss Dows, that he himself was your suitor, and that you had refused him because of the objections of your people." She raised her eyes to his swiftly and dropped them.
She had more than once talked seriously to Phyllis on the subject of George Holland. Of course, George Holland had been indiscreet; the views expressed in his book had shocked his best friends, but think how famous that book had made him, in spite of the publication of Mr. Courtland's "Quest of the Meteor-Bird."
In the middle of December Tennelly and Gila were married. It was not any of Courtland's choosing that he was best man. He shrank inexpressibly from even attending that wedding. He tried to arrange for his Western trip so early as to avoid it. Not that he had any more personal feeling about Gila, but because he dreaded to see his friend tied up to such a future.
Before Courtland's eyes there floated a vision of Gila as she first caught sight of him in the office of the inn. If ever soul was guilty in full knowledge of her sin she had been! Again she passed before his vision with shamed head down-drooped and all her proud, imperial manner gone. The mask had fallen from Gila forever so far as Courtland was concerned.
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